Replacement core switch

[mrbios]

Currently using an aging HP 4108, it's at it's capacity and if i add one more Vlan etc it completely falls over which isn't ideal!!

Any good recommendations of core switches? We IP telephoney, IGMP for a TV system, around 15 Vlans, lots of trunked connections etc etc, pretty much standard stuff so nothing specialist required

Something with 6 fibre connections and 16 RJ45 connections would suffice, but the more the better, i'm not really sure what im looking for in a core switch so can anyone suggest something to consider? our entire network is fitted out with procurve switches but we would be willing to get a cisco core switch if it was worth it

 

[mrbios]

We'll defiantely be looking to have the ability to move the backbone of the network to 10GBs capability in the future so that would be a good feature to have, the HP 5400s were the first ones i took a look at and price wise seemed a bit better than the cisco ones ive looked at, any other suggestions?

 

[mrbios]

Cheers, i think i will recommend to "the powers that be" that we go for a HP 5406 (5412 as York says is probably a bit much for our requirements)

I've been looking at the price of modules on the HP site and they don't seem to do any smaller fibre modules for them, i can see the "HP ProCurve 20-Port 10/100/1000 PoE+ and 4-Port Mini-GBIC zl Module" which look like what we want, we should only need one, but we need more than 4 miniGbic ports and the only other module they have on there is this one: HP ProCurve Switch 5400zl 24p Mini-GBIC Module J8706A which is far beyond our needs, is there anything smaller than that one with maybe 12 or 8 ports for hopefully a lot cheaper too?

 

[mrbios]

Hmmm so for our needs i guess we would be best off buying two of the 20 port + 4 Gbic port modules then, saves a few £100 as we'll certainly never need 20 mini gbic ports

2GB connections are about as fast as we need here and there are only 5 buildings and one has no fibre as it's where the servers are located, i guess we could make use of all 8 by connecting each building up by a 2GB trunk, though doesn't leave any room for expansion, it's a difficult one

You're not really providing much information to go on...for a core switch I wouldn't touch much less than a Cisco 4507R-E these days, but that'll likely be over your needs...the procurves aren't bad but they aren't Cisco either, particularly when you get to any sort of advanced features...

What advanced features do you speak of? as that was the main purpose of this thread was to gather our requirements and see if we should be moving towards bigger better things? Would these features actually benefit us (what are they?)

I'm very in touch with the configuration of HP switches, we have HP network monitoring software etc as well so it would have to be a good reason to move away from HP kit as we've never had a problem with them, as well as the fact we're a council funded school so money is an issue!

 

[mrbios]

unless you need the features of the 5400 why not get the 4208 which has 4 port SFP modules available as I recall??

Well i guess in thiscase my question works both ways Which has the features, which is cheaper, which would make the most of our requirements etc - i know i've been very vague with requirements but the nessescitys are there

 

[mrbios]

Now investigating the possibility of getting an 8200zl switch with 10gb modules, we have a 3400cl in one building we can get a 10gb module for, replace the 2 6108s in another 2 buildings and have a complete 10gb backbone between buildings!

 

[mrbios]

Given what you've said previously about it being a council funded school, that sounds like a colossal waste of money to me, so very few people have any need for a 10Gbit network at the moment, we have in the region of 15,000 servers and although we have a 10Gbit backbone we only did so as having paid for dark fibre the cost of lighting it at 10Gbit instead of 1Gbit was minimal. If you want to spend money you'd be better building great resilience in with multiple core switches...

Well for what we're doing creating a 10GB backbone wouldn't actually cost much more than what it would cost to replace bit's that need replacing now anyway, the 8200 switch was only a possibility whereas there are much cheaper alternatives available. For all the planned improvements we were looking at around £15k, but to implement 10GB backbone into that would up it to about £20-22k which would pay for itself over time.

Thing is if we're upgrading now, why not do it properly and put things in place while we can to keep things covered for the next 6 years or so? (it would also allow us to make some drastic changes to our currently fairly dismall IPTV system to greatly improve the quality) It would give us a lot more scope for improvements, trust me though that money won't be wasted and we will make the most of it