Juniper Switch Proves to be Credible Choice

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In what's become a regular part of device testing, we also measured the EX 4200's power consumption, when idle and when maxed out.

Using a Fluke 335 clamp meter, the Juniper switch consumed 185 watts when idle and 199 watts when its control and data planes were fully loaded. In comparison, the average consumption across seven other 10G Ethernet access switches were 150 and 174 watts for idle and full loads, respectively.

That puts the Juniper switch on the power-hungry side of average. It's nowhere near the maximum draw of 316 watts (from a fully loaded Foundry FastIron Edge X448) but also far from the paltry 79 watts consumed by an idle Alcatel-Lucent OmniSwitch 6850.

Authentication Support

Considering Juniper's longtime advocacy of network access control (NAC), it's not surprising that the EX 4200 did well in our authentication tests. The switch passed all six scenarios, five of which used 802.1X. These tests examined authentication into a statically defined virtual LAN; authentication of multiple clients per port; authentication into a dynamically allocated VLAN; authentication with dynamically applied access control lists (ACL); and placement into a restricted VLAN upon authentication failure.

In the ACL test the switch applied rules previously defined on the switch; this is far less cumbersome than the approach taken by some other switches, where ACLs must be entered into the RADIUS server then returned to supplicants during authentication.

The switch also passed a sixth test involving authentication by a media access control (MAC) address; this scenario represents the case where an end-station, such as a printer, lacks 802.1X supplicant software. One catch here was that the switch's CLI did not display clients currently authenticated by MAC addresses, as it did with 802.1X-authenticated clients. Juniper says it expects an August software release to remedy that.

The Juniper switch passed all access control tests with minor configuration changes needed for each scenario. In comparison, Cisco's Catalyst 3750E required no configuration changes for any of our scenarios except for multi-auth. Then again, the Cisco switch failed the multi-auth test, authenticating only the first user and forwarding unauthenticated traffic from the second and subsequent users. Few other switches we've tested (Extreme's Summit X450 and Foundry's FastIron Edge X448 are exceptions) passed all these test cases, with or without configuration changes.