But Arista, for now, may have them beat on latency and features like LANZ. While sporting half the ports of its own 7148SX or Juniper’s QFX3500, The 7124SX is a latency leader, says Mike Spanbauer, principal analyst for enterprise networking and data center technology at Current Analysis.

“If speed is the priority and the applications are latency sensitive – nothing else exists as fast in a top-of-rack device,” Spanbauer says.  “The next fastest product would be Juniper’s recently announced switch for the QFabric – the QFX3500 – which possesses just over 1 microsecond performance capabilities through the box (a bit over two times the Arista stated performance), followed closely by Brocade’s VDX (1.5 microseconds) and then Cisco’s Nexus 5548 (about 2.2 microseconds).”

LANZ is another feature that is unique to Arista and may be applicable to other functions – like security, Spanbauer says.

“Arista portrays it as a transaction-tuning function, where microseconds matter,” Spanbauer says.  “The ability to graph latency by port and by queue offers network administrators insights they did not have historically.

“The most intriguing application… is the ability to log all queue and access attempts in real time at 10G,” he says. “Consider the security implications… if you can analyze this in real time.”