Re: Advice regarding Cisco/Juniper/HP

[Andrew Thrift <andrew () networklabs co nz>]

> > From a technical point of view, I have never worked in a shop that used HP
> or 3Com for the infrastructure.  Dot-com's, telco's, bank's, hosting
> companies...I haven't seen any of them using 3com or HP.  Additionally, I'm
> not fond of having to deal with a third set of equipment.  I'm not exactly
> comfortable going with HP, but I'd like some data to help resolve the
> debate.
>    
I work with networking products from all of the mentioned vendors on a 
daily basis.  HP Networking (was ProCurve) make a solid SME switching 
product, it is comparable to Cisco 2000/3000 series switches, they also 
have chassis switches such as the 54xx/82xx, however these lack a lot of 
the more advanced features available from Cisco and Juniper, and have 
significant hardware limitations e.g. backplane bandwidth.   HP also do 
not have decent stackable switches, which will be a concern if you want 
to split LACP trunks across multiple switches/chassis.

 Another major negative with the HP gear for us is that their switches 
only support SFP/SFP+ modules manufactured by HP, so those SFP+ Twin-AX 
cables that came with your Dell/IBM Blade chassis will be useless to 
connect to your HP Switches, to add insult HP often sell their own 
modules at 3x the price of an equivalent module from say Extreme or Juniper.

> So my questions to the NANOG community are: Would you recommend HP over
> Cisco or Juniper?  How is HP's functionality and performance compared to
> Cisco or Juniper?  Does anyone have any HP networking experiences they can
> share, good or bad?
>    

My reccomendation would be, use Juniper for Core and Aggregation with 
ProCurve at the edge.



Regards,




Andrew