Advice regarding Cisco/Juniper/HP

Thu Jun 17 13:52:13 UTC 2010

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?