Advice regarding Cisco/Juniper/HP

Thu Jun 17 14:15:55 UTC 2010

This situation scares me. It has HP "best interest" written all over it.
You have expertise in competing vendors but not with HP/3Com. They could very
well be easy to configure but maybe inferior when you get into the details of
how they function. Then if you find out they can't support your business needs,
it would cost even more to replace them. I don't think that's going to happen,
I'm sure the people writing the checks will tell you to make it work, but if it can't
meet the demands, it's going to hurt your business... 

The people writing the checks need to know this. I'm not against new companies
competing with Cisco/Juniper but at the same time, you don't want to be the guinea pigs
for them....

> Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2010 09:52:13 -0400
> Subject: Advice regarding Cisco/Juniper/HP
> From: james at jamesstewartsmith.com
> To: nanog at nanog.org
> 
> I'm looking for a little insight regarding an infrastructure purchase my
> company is considering.  We are a carrier, and we're in the process of
> building a DR site.  Our existing production site is all Cisco equipment
> with a little Juniper thrown into the mix.  I'd like to either get the same
> Cisco equipment for the DR, or the equivalent Juniper equipment.  We have
> skill sets for both Cisco and Juniper, so neither would be a problem to
> manage.
> 
> A business issue has come up since we have a large number of HP servers for
> Unix and Wintel.  With HP's recent acquisition of 3Com they are pressing
> hard to quote on the networking hardware as well, going as far as offering
> prices that are way below the equivalent Cisco and Juniper models.  In
> addition they're saying they'll cut us deals on the HP servers for the DR
> site to help with the decision to go for HP Networking.  Obviously to the
> people writing the cheques this carries a lot of weight.
> 
> >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.
> 
> 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?