In 2016, Arista Networks together with powerful industry leaders, announced the OSFP (Octal Small Form-Factor Pluggable) specification and multi-source agreement.
Ten years later, more than 100 million OSFP are projected to ship this year, making OSFP the most important optics module form factor of all time.
The remarkable success of the OSFP form factor was largely due to a combination of:
- High front panel density: Supporting 32 1600G OSFP modules per 1U, and
- Robust thermal design: Supporting 30W+ power per module with air cooling.
This enabled OSFP to support every optics standard—from DR, FR, LR, SR to ZR—as well as all interface technologies, including fully-retimed, half-retimed, and linear or LPO optics, a technology that Arista pioneered to minimize power consumption.
OSFP will continue to thrive as the highest volume optics module form factor for the foreseeable future. That said, the relentless increase in bandwidth demands of large AI data centers are exceeding the OSFP design envelope in terms of bandwidth density, cooling capacity, and reliability.
To address the requirements of AI data centers, we developed a new 12.8 Tbps liquid cooled optics module that we call XPO (eXtra-dense Pluggable Optics). It offers 4X the front-panel density of OSFP, integrated liquid cooling that supports any kind of optics, and a large reduction in failure rates due to a combination of lower component counts and lower component temperatures.
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