Leveraging Orolia’s HATI core in combination with Arista MetaWatch, the integration provides sub-nanosecond timestamping with accurate, precise and reliable timing
Orolia, the world leader in resilient positioning, navigation and timing (PNT), has successfully supported the integration of its White Rabbit High Accuracy Timing IP (HATI) core within the Arista 7130 network devices. This collaboration between Orolia and Arista sets the new standard in time synchronization for FPGA-based network devices with the support of native White Rabbit capabilities to achieve sub-nanosecond time synchronization using optical fibers across multiple points in the network.
This integration is factory supported in combination with the MetaWatch application in the Arista 7130LB platform, enabling distributed traffic capture with high-resolution timestamping, buffering and de-duplication, to provide advanced network monitoring and detailed network analytics. Deep buffering, time-ordered aggregation and de-duplication reduce the load on downstream packet capture and analysis devices.
“One key feature of this important collaboration is the simplification of the overall network architecture by eliminating coaxial cabling and PPS distribution equipment,” said Francisco Girela, White Rabbit Application Engineer with Orolia. “This integrated solution eases the adoption of White Rabbit, leading to cost savings, reduced footprint, and better scalability.”
White Rabbit is an ultra-accurate IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol (PTP) implementation that achieves sub-nanosecond accuracy over optical fiber links. Designed for use in avionics, telecommunications, space, defense and scientific applications, White Rabbit has become the gold standard for time distribution within electronic trading networks.
Arista’s MetaWatch is a powerful FPGA-based network application designed for Arista’s 7130 platform and combines several components of a traditional network monitoring solution into one device, which simplifies network data capture, monitoring and analytics.
“Moving from analog time synchronization to fiber-based White Rabbit will allow our customers to improve their network analytics while improving the overall synchronization accuracy across a large estate,” says David Snowdon, Engineering Director with Arista. “The combination of MetaWatch and White Rabbit allows for less than a nanosecond of error on any timestamp taken in a wide-area network – a crucial feature for trading firms optimizing their latency, or for exchanges guaranteeing fairness.”
This joint effort shows the flexibility of the HATI core to be integrated with third-party FPGA-based network devices and positions Orolia as the reference integrator of High Accuracy time synchronization solutions for multiple applications in segments as diverse as finance, telecom or defense. Together with the extensive portfolio of resilient PNT solutions, Orolia is leading the development of customer-based solutions to ease the adoption of the next generation of timing in the industry.
Supported Products
Orolia’s WR Z16, a reliable and precise time fan-out solution for White Rabbit distribution on 1G ethernet-based networks, is a standalone device with 16 SFP connectors that provide sub-nanosecond accuracy over the plug-and-play optical fiber links. The HATI core requires an activation license generated by Orolia to be loaded in the reference WR-Z16 device paired with it in order to be functional.
