DAX Managed Switches

DAX recently introduced two managed switches with fibre connectivity for data

centers-DX-5712GS and DX-5050MG. While DX-5712GS is a layer L3 SNMP managed

Gigabit Ethernet standalone switch, DX-5050MG is an L2 managed switch. Here is a

detailed account of what all features they have and how they performed on

testing.

DAX DX-5712GS



This is a good choice when you have a mixed Ethernet network. It's a layer 3
managed switch with four 10/100/1000 Base-T ports and 12 gigabit SFP (Small form

factor pluggable) ports. Small Form-factor luggable is a specification for

optical modular transceivers. The SFP ports are designed to be used with small

form factor connectors, and they are hot-swappable and also provide physical

compactness. SFP modules support Fibre Channel, Gigabit Ethernet (GbE), and

SONET applications and can provide data rates upto 5 Gbits/sec. Out of these 12

gigabit SFP ports, four ports are combo. For SFP ports, you require SFP modules,

which are interfaces for fiber optic connections and it also provides support

for Gigabit Ethernet applications.

The device supports up to 16K MAC address entries and supports all known L2

features like VLANs support, IGMP snooping, link aggregation, Broadcast storm

protection etc. In L3 features, it provides support for OSPF routing, IP

Multicast Routing, IP Redundancy and support for super and multi netting. It

also lets you do traffic prioritization through IP precedence and IP port

priority features. In its security options, you have port security wherein you

can configure a port with one or more device MAC addresses that are authorized

to access the network through that port. Other than that it also supports IP and

MAC ACLs, encryption for web management. It also has redundant power supply

option for power fault-tolerance which ensures a reliable system .

DAX DX-5050MG



This is a Layer 2 managed Switch with forty eight 10/100 Mbps Fast Ethernet
ports, two Gigabit ports for stacking/uplink and two combo G(RJ45/SFP) ports for

uplink. These four Gigabit uplink ports support both Gigabit Copper as well as

Gigabit Fiber. The switch supports all standard L2 features like support for

VLANs, link aggregation, port mirroring, Spanning Tree Protocol etc. It also

supports port trunking with up to 4 trunk groups.

It supports 8 ports in each group per stack. The switch also has auto sensing

and auto negotiating capabilities which allow the switch to automatically sense

whether the network device is running at 10 Mbps or 100 Mbps, and it then

adjusts itself for optimal performance. In auto negotiating, it automatically

negotiates and runs the highest supported transmission rate, whether half or

full duplex. The switch has a comprehensive set of security features for

connectivity and access control. It includes ACL, RADIUS (Authentication),

port-level security, and identity-based network services with 802.1x, TACACS,

SSL and SSH.

Tests and results



The switches were easy to configure through their web interfaces and can also be
configured through telnet. We used NetIQ Qcheck for testing the switches. The

DX-5050MG gave an average throughput of 93Mbps and maximum throughput of 94Mbps

in an isolated network while transferring 1000 Kbytes of payload from one end to

another and response time of 1ms. Subsequently, we flooded the switch with large

amounts of traffic and the throughput went down to 71 Mbps, which is less than

the Netgear ProSafe FS728TS switch, which we tested earlier (August issue) and

had scored 73 Mbps.

To test the CoS feature of this switch, we tried a simple test. We connected

three machines with the switch. Then, we transferred a 200 MB file from two of

the machines to the third machine simultaneously. We first did it with CoS



disabled, and time taken by the two machines was 49 seconds and 51 seconds
respectively. We then enabled CoS and gave one of the ports priority over the

other. This time, the port with the lower priority took 40 seconds to transfer

the data and the port with higher priority took just 26 seconds, which was

almost half the original time.

For testing the Dax DX-5712GS, we connected it with DAX 5050MG with a fibre

optic cable for cascading and we created a gigabit isolated network with

machines connected to gigabit ports of both the swtiches. The maximum throughput

was 720 Mbps on transferring 1000 Kbytes of payload from one end to another. On

flooding the switch with traffic, the throughput came down to 532Mbps and the

avg response time was 1 Ms.

Bottom Line: Considering the features and usability of DX-5712GS in

data centers and its good performance, it's worth a buy, while DX-5050MG is

also feature-rich and gave pretty good performance, but its price is something

you would want to look into further.