Case Study: Consortium GARR achieves a resilient, high-performance 100G spine-leaf network with Arista Networks

Italian national network for universities and research GARR, selects Arista Networks to deploy a next-generation network infrastructure

GARR, Italy’s national ultra‑broadband network for universities, research centres and cultural institutions, connects over 1,000 sites and about 3 million users across five main data centres. Its legacy Layer‑2 fabric and heavy reliance on Spanning Tree Protocol could not keep up with rising East‑West traffic from virtualization and containerization, causing poor bandwidth utilization and slow convergence.

GARR selected Arista to deploy a Spine‑Leaf IP fabric using DCS‑7050CX3 and DCS‑7050SX3 switches, a 100G core, and Arista software (EOS, CloudVision and AVD) with EVPN/VXLAN and BGP to enable network‑as‑code automation. The result was faster convergence, better load balancing and bandwidth use, streamlined migration and operations through automation, and a more resilient, scalable, future‑proof infrastructure.

Consortium GARR

Massimo Carboni

GARR deputy director and Chief Technical Officer