Advice regarding Cisco/Juniper/HP

Thu Jun 17 16:47:58 UTC 2010

We've had a much different experience than what Tom is describing here. 
We've used HP extensively in our networks, mostly because of the price 
and warranty. For simple, flat networks, they are a great buy, in my 
opinion. We've never seen the packet loss issues that were described, 
and we push quite a bit of data through the 5412, 2900, and 6600 series 
products.

That said, we've never used them for much outside of basic layer 2 
services. We have a couple of c6500s for our core network, but at the 
edge, we have been very happy with HP. So far, warranty service has been 
flawless, although we have only replaced maybe half a dozen switches out 
of about 70 total that we have installed, over the course of 5 years.

There isn't much as far as advanced features (for example, don't expect 
to get MPLS or BGP), but since we don't use those features at the edge, 
we haven't been hurt by that.

Tom

On 06/17/2010 10:37 AM, Tom wrote:
> On Thu, 17 Jun 2010, James Smith wrote:
>    
>> So my questions to the NANOG community are: Would you recommend HP over
>> Cisco or Juniper?
>>      
> Pretty much never, unless you're talking about a rebadged Brocade product.
> Every time I've seen HP networking gear in production, its usually before
> it gets replaced with something else. The last install I dealt with was
> having so many problems it had a constant %10 packetloss on a simple flat
> network.
>
>    
>> How is HP's functionality and performance compared to Cisco or Juniper?
>>      
> Typically poor, but this varies widely with the series of HP gear.
> The software updates available also vary widely in quality, and I have
> rarely gotten a good answer from HP support on anything.
>
>    
>> Does anyone have any HP networking experiences they can share, good or
>> bad?
>>      
> To end on a positive note, HP does have a good warranty, is typically
> fairly low cost and provides free software updates.
>
> -Tom
>
>    

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Tom Ammon
Network Engineer
Office: 801.587.0976
Mobile: 801.674.9273

Center for High Performance Computing
University of Utah
http://www.chpc.utah.edu