Advice regarding Cisco/Juniper/HP

Fri Jun 18 02:25:59 UTC 2010

> 
> Product documentation will be freely available on the new MyBrocade
> support
> site that is under construction.  This is part of a huge effort to
> integrate
> the disparate support sites' software, knowledge bases, manuals, etc.
> into
> one new happy place.
> 
> Stand by, and thanks for your patience.
> 
> Greg
> (works for Brocade)
> 
> --

I brought up the issue to Martin Skagen last year in San Francisco and
we probably chatted for over an hour on that subject.  There is a
certain leverage that the community having access to manuals provides to
a manufacturer.  If people who might never buy a support contract can
pick up a piece of gear and find the manuals for it, particularly
someone who might be just learning about your products, you might be
able to create a loyal customer for many years to come.  As it currently
stands, a piece of used (but still quite viable) Brocade/Foundry gear
might be quite useless to and avoided by someone in that category.  

>From personal experience, I often like to peruse manuals of new
equipment in order to judge the value of new features.  The availability
of the manual can generate a sale if I can see that a feature would be
of value in the network.  One can often obtain a better idea of how the
feature works from reading the manual than from some marketing slick.

It would also be important to have access to old manuals, too, for gear
that is no longer manufactured.  Enabling self-support is also a way to
install brand loyalty.

Getting back to HP gear, I haven't had a problem with the rebranded
Brocade stuff but there was a line of low-end switches that gave me fits
for a couple of years.  I think others have mentioned the same issue
where they would simply decide to start dropping packets on all ports.
Kicking the switch every week or so was the only cure.  Don't have them
in the network anymore so I don't know if they fixed it.