Arista 7280R3 with Encryption

The Arista 7280R3 Series with Encryption is the MACsec-enabled variant of the 7280R3 universal leaf switch router, adding hardware IEEE 802.1AE encryption on every port while retaining the full 7280R3 feature set: MPLS, Segment Routing, EVPN-VXLAN, BGP-LU, 512K IPv4 host routes, 256K IPv4 LPM routes, and 128K MAC addresses across fixed 1RU and 2RU form factors delivering 4.8 to 12.8 Tbps. Models with the -K suffix in the product designation indicate hardware MACsec capability, and both AES-128-GCM and AES-256-GCM cipher suites are supported per port at line rate.

The encryption-enabled 7280R3 addresses deployments where a fixed switch-router must simultaneously encrypt inter-rack or inter-site links and perform full L3 routing with route-scale tables. Rather than requiring separate router and encryption appliance hardware in series, which doubles the failure domain count and port overhead, the 7280R3-K models consolidate both functions. Typical deployment positions include border-leaf nodes in regulated-industry fabrics where uplinks to the spine must be encrypted, DCI gateway positions where dark-fibre or metro-Ethernet links require MACsec, and carrier-edge aggregation where MACsec protects inter-PE links in MPLS networks.