Excitement may mount when it’s time to implement the VoIP switch as you know your productivity will soon increase while your communications costs will plummet. Network switches as a general rule, however, tend to be less exciting than the average technology implementation, especially for the IT department. That is, unless the network switch is the Arista 7500E.

According to this recent report, the 7500E is a product line that offers a group of new line cards and fabric modules that improve on the performance of the 7500 chassis. Four new line cards are available to support the 7500E, which include the 12x 100GbE line card designed with integrated SR-10 optics to enable triple-speed; a 48x10GbE line card supported with two triple-speed 100GbE uplinks; and a 48x10GbE line card.

These latest cards enable serious productivity and speed, including 256K ARP entries, 256K host routes, 256K multicast routes, 256K MAC addresses, 64-way multi chassis link aggregation and 64-way equal-cost multi path. As a result, the network can grow to support massive traffic volumes with a variety of hosts and routes and a number of parallel paths.

As a VoIP switch, the 7500E spine is based on a leaf data center architecture, offering deep per-port buffers to support the effort. These buffers support the traffic bursts coming into the network, managing the multiple senders capable of sustaining up to 40GbE flows that are all trying to reach the same recipient.

Arista’s universal network architecture takes the stand that the enterprise should build the network once, and be done with it. In such an environment, the type of compute model or business application supported by the network doesn’t matter. When coupled with the intelligent placement of workloads, the architecture creates a data center where the network itself is not in the way.

According to Arista VP, Doug Gourlay, "Our customers should be able to take the network and run it today with the protocols they know. But then say they want to try Nicira...then later PlumGrid, then Big Switch. And then say they want to run OSPF and BGP and IS-IS again. Our customers should be able to do that without changing the hardware, and without changing the software on the edge boxes."

One VoIP switch provider making additional waves in the marketplace is Sippy Software with its VoIP offerings delivered through virtual software environments or Sippy Softswitch-as-a-Service. Clients can leverage a cost-effective and virtual 4 /5 softswitch with options that can easily range from advanced routing and rating options to VoIP and calling card providers. As one of the largest virtual hosting providers on the market, Sippy Software continues to focus development efforts on meeting the growing needs of a discerning and global customer base.