Arista DCS-7280SR3K-48YC8-FLX-R | 7280R3 48-Port 25G Switch, 8x 100G QSFP, FLX-Lite

Q: What is the difference between the FLX-Lite license and the full FLX license?
A: The FLX-Lite license supports full routing with up to 256K routes, EVPN, VXLAN, Segment Routing, and base MPLS LSR without traffic engineering or link/node protection. The full FLX license extends this to 2 million routes, over 24K ACL entries, and advanced MPLS-LER/LSR with traffic engineering and link/node protection capabilities.

Q: What does the -R suffix indicate in the model number?
A: The -R suffix indicates rear-to-front airflow, meaning air flows from the fan side to the switch port side. This configuration is designed for hot-aisle exhaust deployments where heated air is expelled toward the rear of the rack. The -F variant provides front-to-rear airflow for cold-aisle containment.

Q: Can the QSFP28 ports be broken out to multiple lower-speed connections?
A: Yes, each 100GbE QSFP28 port supports breakout configurations to 4x25GbE or 4x10GbE connections, allowing up to 80 logical ports total when all QSFP28 ports are broken out. This provides deployment flexibility for mixed-speed environments.

Q: What routing table capacity does the 7280SR3K variant provide?
A: The 7280SR3K variant features large route tables supporting over 5 million IPv4 unicast routes, significantly exceeding the standard 7280SR3 capacity of over 2 million routes. This enhanced capacity is ideal for internet peering, carrier edge, and data center interconnect applications requiring internet-scale routing tables.

Q: Is this switch compatible with spine-leaf data center architectures?
A: Yes, the DCS-7280SR3K-48YC8-FLX-R is purpose-built for leaf-spine data center fabrics, providing high-density 25GbE server connectivity with 100GbE uplinks to the spine layer. It supports EVPN-VXLAN overlay networks, consistent low latency, and deep buffers for lossless forwarding in modern cloud-scale environments.