Arista DCS-7280SR3AM-48YC8-R | 7280R3A 48-Port 50G Switch, 6x 200G, TunnelSec

Q: What is the difference between the 7280SR3AM and standard 7280SR3 models?
A: The 7280SR3AM is part of the 7280R3A Series and features 48x50GbE ports and 6x200G uplinks, compared to the standard 7280SR3 which has 48x25GbE ports and 8x100G uplinks. The 'M' designation indicates TunnelSec encryption capability with MACsec, IPsec, and VXLANsec support for line-rate strong encryption.

Q: What encryption capabilities does the DCS-7280SR3AM-48YC8-R provide?
A: This model supports Arista TunnelSec technology with line-rate AES-256-GCM encryption. It provides IEEE 802.1AE MACsec for point-to-point link encryption, IPsec (RFC 4303) for encrypted IP tunnels, and VXLANsec for overlay network encryption, all operating at full wire speed without performance penalty. Encryption features require appropriate licensing.

Q: What does the 'R' suffix indicate in the model number?
A: The 'R' suffix indicates rear-to-front airflow, meaning cool air enters from the fan side and exhausts through the port side. This is designed for data centers with hot-aisle/cold-aisle configurations where the port side faces the hot aisle. A corresponding 'F' model is available for front-to-rear airflow.

Q: Can the 200G QSFP-DD ports be used with lower-speed optics?
A: Yes, the 6x200G QSFP-DD ports support flexible configurations including 100G QSFP28 optics and can be broken out to 4x50G or 8x25G per port, providing deployment flexibility for mixed-speed environments and migration scenarios.

Q: What are the typical use cases for this switch?
A: The DCS-7280SR3AM-48YC8-R is ideal for high-performance leaf-spine data center fabrics, secure WAN edge deployments, data center interconnects requiring encryption, IP storage networks, internet peering with large routing tables, and cloud environments requiring 50G server connectivity with 200G spine uplinks.