[127234] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Advice regarding Cisco/Juniper/HP
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Carl Rosevear)
Thu Jun 17 16:57:21 2010
From: Carl Rosevear <crosevear@skytap.com>
In-Reply-To: <1276799730.7682.39.camel@petrie>
Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2010 12:02:34 -0700
To: nanog@nanog.org
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
The main problem with HP switches and their 'free software upgrades' is =
that there are regularly bugs and regressions in the software and their =
solution is to have you 'oh just update the software'... this is not =
always practical in a production environment. And other weirdnesses. I =
like their gear for office networks, etc but I, personally, would keep =
it out of the DC and resist it in general as much as possible. A lot =
better than stringing a bunch of Linksys together but really not on par =
with "real" Cisco or Juniper. Close enough though that if you engineer =
around the effect of the constant software upgrades, etc, they can be a =
good play. Most networks I have worked on would rather get rid of their =
HPs and try to do so whenever they can take the outage / afford the new =
gear / etc. When I was a consultant in a more rural area, I pushed HP =
switches because businesses needed to operate on the cheap, would NOT =
buy Cisco due to price, etc... but I do find HP better than most of the =
other brands in that price range in regard to configurability, feature =
set, and reliability.
-Carl
