Arista DCS 7050QX 32 Vs. Arista DCS 7050QX 32S - fiberopticnetworking/vocanoman GitHub Wiki

The ever-growing need for higher speed data transmission has spurred the development of all kinds of network devices, such as fiber patch cables which have promoted from OM1 to OM5, and fiber optic transceivers which have evolved from SFP to QSFP28. in addition, as long as you have basic knowledge about cabling system in data centers, you are not likely to be unfamiliar with switch. Of course, switch also has been optimized its configuration and capacity over time from with only 1G SFP port for 1G network to with 40G QSFP+ port for 40G network. Nowadays, 40G network has become the mainstream in data center and switch with multiple 40G QSFP+ ports is popular with network engineer. The Arista 7050QX Series are designed for 10/40GbE network for data center and this article is going to focus on the comparison between Arista DCS-7050QX-32 and Arista DCS-7050QX-32S switch.

As the members of the Arista 7050QX Series, Arista DCS-7050QX-32 and Arista DCS-7050QX-32S are the key components of the Arista portfollo of data center switches. Both of them are built in compact and energy efficient form factors with wire speed layer 2 and layer 3 features, combined with advanced features for software defined cloud networking. In addition, both Arista DCS-7050QX-32 and Arista DCS-7050QX-32S are able to support a flexible combination of 10G and 40G in a highly compact form factor. Because of this feature, network engineers can design large leaf and spine networks to accommodate east-west traffic patterns found in modern data centers, high performance compute and big data environments.

From the model name, it is not difficult to infer that there are both similarities and differences between Arista DCS-7050QX-32 and Arista DCS-7050QX-32S. The following part will focus on the similarities and differences between these two Arista switches.

Figure of Arista DCS-7050QX-32 and Arista DCS-7050QX-32S

• Both of these two switches are configured with 32 × 40GbE QSFP+ ports and 24 of them can be used with breakout cables as 4 × 10GbE. That is to say, you can set up 32 × 40GbE system or 96 × 10GbE and 8×40GbE system.
• Both of them offer low latency from 550ns in cut-through mode.
• Both of them can support throughput up to 2.56 terabits per second.
• Both of them provide 12MB packet buffer pool that is allocated dynamically to ports that are congested.
• Both them are characterized with typical power consumption of less than 5 watts per 40GbE port for lower cost of ownership. With three QSFP+ ports active using DAC cables and a fourth using a breakout cable power on a single power supply is 112W-114W once it booted which is very good.
• They not only have the same size 48.3x 4.4x 40.64cm, but also the same weight 9.1kg.

• In addition to 32 × 40GbE QSFP+ ports, the Arista DCS-7050QX-32S features four 10G SFP+ ports that are internally shared with the first QSFP+ port for directly connecting 10GbE and 1GbE interfaces.
• The Arista DCS-7050QX-32 has a Dual-core x86 CPU while Arista DCS-7050QX-32S has a Quad-core x86
• The optional SSD storage of Arista DCS-7050QX-32 is 100 Gigabytes while the SSD storage of Arista DCS-7050QX-32S is 120 Gigabytes.
• The Arista DCS-7050QX-32 can achieve 92% efficiency power supply while the power supply efficiency of Arista DCS-7050QX-32S is 93%.
• The Arista DCS-7050QX-32 sells for $1200-$1400 while Arista DCS-7050QX-32S sells for around $2300.

Combined with Arista EOS, Arista DCS-7050QX-32 and Arista DCS-7050QX-32S?can deliver advanced features for big data, cloud, virtualized and traditional designs. They can be either used with 40GBASE-SR QSFP+ and multimode fiber cable for short optical links or used with 40GBASE-LR4 QSFP+ and single mode fiber cable for long transmission distance. Besides, they can use breakout cable to achieve 40G to 10G connection. Therefore, both of them are a good selection for data center 10G and 40G network deployment. As for which one to choose, it all depends on your specific requirement. If your budget is tight, Arista DCS-7050QX-32 will be better value; if you want 10G SFP+ ports, then choose Arista DCS-7050QX-32S.