Cisco or ProCurve?

Good enough kit.

At the end of the day, you know if you need it. If you're running a dozen switches on one site without any particular complexity then you likely don't *need* cisco, if you're talking about dozens of switches across multiple sites doing all the advanced port security stuff then probably you're better off with it.

Switches will last years and years, so they're worth investing in. I found a Cisco 2924 in a datacenter the other day which had an uptime of 5 years+, happily serving hosted servers still.

Nothing wrong with the HP kit if you're on an economy drive but the Cisco is still probably the very best available, so if you can afford it over the lifetime of these sorts of devices (easily 5+ years for most people) then I'd go for it.

Not to mention, everybody knows how to work them.
 
We have a total of 188 switches
3 x 5412zl Procurve as core switches
40 x 3524yl Procurve switches for our distribution layer
145 x 2650/2610 Procurves for our edge connectivity.

They work just fine, have a great set of features and the lifetime warranty is great. HP do a network management app called procrve manger which for the basic version is free which is pretty good for managing the switches.
Another nice thing is that the firmware updates are free to joe public for download, unlike cisco.
We still have Cisco routers, but our network is fine, and I rate HP kit, they really seem to be trying to innovate and their strategy of trying to push the intelligence to the edge of the network is something I really like.
Although I agree in part with bigredshark comments (you will know if you need Cisco) I do think everyone else has caught up a lot more, the port security and .1x stuff is excellent on HP and I think they are actually better than Cisco on a lot of things now, and the extra price tag just cant be justified.

We still have a couple of Procurve 8000 chugging away, they must be 7yrs old now, end of life but still work fine

Mind you, the Cisco 3400ME is a beautiful bit of kit, we bought one last week and I love it :-)
 
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We have loads of ProCurves on our site, and we've never had a fault with them at all.
Infact, we've found them more reliable than the ISPs provided Cisco 2900. :p.
 
While I work exclusively with Cisco at the moment, Procurves offer virtually everything that Cisco do at a very reasonable price.

They are rock solid switches at great prices - can't really say anymore.
 
Use nothing but procurves here, very easy to manage, not had a single problem with them, a whole host of features available

Also go procurve manager plus which isnt half bad but its only really usefull for seeing the status of everything at once, uses a lot of resources though, takes up nearly 300mb ram just to sit there and run
 
mrbios said:
Also go procurve manager plus which isnt half bad but its only really usefull for seeing the status of everything at once, uses a lot of resources though, takes up nearly 300mb ram just to sit there and run
Click to expand...
How do you find PMP in general?
The 'Demo' thing looks good, especially if you put the auth settings in, as it'll map the network out quite nicely. But im unsure about wacking down £800 for the full version...
 
It's not bad but its debatable as to wether its worth £800 to you

When i come into the office in the morning its one of the first programs i open, i leave it open there all day then if anyone has a problem or i need to do some configuration work like i am at the moment (finding the location of every printer on the network then tagging a seperate vlan to each port they are on) its very easy to just chop and change between switches rather than sitting there guessing IP addresses to get telnet sessions up

I've also always hated having to try and read through the errors list on a telnet session so it clears the errors up nicely and makes them easier to read in case of a problem

Some of the things like traffic monitoring etc i haven't got working, mainly due to lack of playing around with it, so ill have to sort that soon and have more of a play around :D

If you have to do quite a fair bit of configuration work or are making multiple changes to the network on a regular basis I would recommend it, but if you think its one of those programs that will sit there waiting to be used in the rare occurrence of an issue I wouldn't say its worth the price tag it comes with
 
We are a procurve switch house.

One thing I can say from my experience is the kit has been extremely reliable and HP do standby their warranty. We have had a few fans fail on older 4000 switches (Yes we still have a few!) and each time the relacements were there next day.

Also we have had no issues with HP support and have always got thought to a person who actually understands the issue and is capable of troubleshooting it.
 
Cant knock ProCurve but it depends what you want to do. Running the risk of getting flamed, Cisco can do a heck of a lot more than ProCurve.
 
SMN said:
Cant knock ProCurve but it depends what you want to do. Running the risk of getting flamed, Cisco can do a heck of a lot more than ProCurve.
Click to expand...

My preference is cisco for core switches and procurve for the client connecting switches

mainly due to routing on cisco switches being much better, we have a 4108 at work we're thinking of changing for a cisco switch because the 4108s routing abilities is terrible (basically we think its full, it can do no more routing than we have it doing right now! the second we add one more to it the whole thing falls over + for some we cannot plug all 20 lan ports in on it without the network falling over)
 
Being Cisco through and through i would say no contest, i wont kick HP though they have a solid range of both layer 2 and layer 3 switches.

I would always go for Cisco at the core nework layer though, there performance far outweighs the latter in terms of both throughput and there respective featuresets.
 
We are a Cisco Partner so primarily use Cisco switches. The simple fact of the matter is that Cisco switches cost a LOT more money, and sometimes budgets don't allow for them. We wanted a 24 port gigabit switch for some low usage iSCSI stuff recently. We bought a Procurve for around £215. We couldn't even get close to that price with NFR on a 24 port Cisco gig switch. Thats before you factor in Smartnet!!
The HP seems very solid to be fair, wouldn't have an issue using them again, but use Cisco wherever possible.
 
I work for a Cisco and HP Gold Partner so we supply both, Cisco is by far the most popular in the enterprise space and surprisingly in the mid-market too.

I think the wide availability in the channel of Cisco parts helps as people like kit to arrive quickly after getting project work signed off.

The frustrating thing about selling is Cisco is because it is so reliable sometimes people choose not to take the smartnet support and just decide that if anything goes wrong they'll just pay through the nose for a sameday delivery to make the problem go away or for larger roll-outs keep spare units onsite! This is a headache for me because we pay a 5% penalty if we sell Cisco gear without smartnet!

We're one of the few UK resellers with a no grey kit policy enforced across the group which means our pricing has to be ultra competitive with some of the cheekier resellers who don't have such restrictions and make a fortune selling the dodgy stuff to unsuspecting customers :@
 
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