The Arista MACsec solution is integrated to a 7500R Series 36-port 100GbE line card offering high port density and secure performance at an efficient cost point. The 7500R MACsec solution is fully compatible with all other 7500R series line card and utilizes proven encryption technology to protect traffic for simple and scalable data center interconnect. In addition with a choice of pluggable 100G optics it can be used to secure links between tiers in leaf and spine data center designs.

Standards-based IEEE 802.1AE (MAC Security standard, referred to as MACsec) capabilities provide line-rate frame encryption and authentication. This ensures confidentiality as well as providing anti-replay protection and therefore confidence in the integrity of encrypted traffic.

The phenomenal growth in demand for bandwidth, driven by mobile, video streaming and cloud applications, is driving the need for connecting several geographically separate data centers to maintain seamless content delivery and provide application agility. One of the major challenges for data center operators is to protect the data from passive wire tapping, intrusion and other attacks. To keep up with the global growth of inter-site bandwidth, interconnecting these data centers has to be operationally simple and economically efficient while also ensuring security.

Traditional transport infrastructure cannot meet the density challenge and most existing encryption solutions require additional systems that are expensive to deploy and manage so deploying bulk data center encryption is challenging. The Arista 7500R Series 100G MACsec line card provides IEEE 802.1AE defined MACsec encryption at wire speed on all ports for the secure transport of data, without compromising on either density or performance.