I'm looking for a little insight regarding an infrastructure purchase my
company is considering. We are a carrier, and we're in the process of
building a DR site. Our existing production site is all Cisco equipment
with a little Juniper thrown into the mix. I'd like to either get the same
Cisco equipment for the DR, or the equivalent Juniper equipment. We have
skill sets for both Cisco and Juniper, so neither would be a problem to
manage.
A business issue has come up since we have a large number of HP servers for
Unix and Wintel. With HP's recent acquisition of 3Com they are pressing
hard to quote on the networking hardware as well, going as far as offering
prices that are way below the equivalent Cisco and Juniper models. In
addition they're saying they'll cut us deals on the HP servers for the DR
site to help with the decision to go for HP Networking. Obviously to the
people writing the cheques this carries a lot of weight.
From a technical point of view, I have never worked in a shop that used HP
or 3Com for the infrastructure. Dot-com's, telco's, bank's, hosting
companies...I haven't seen any of them using 3com or HP. Additionally, I'm
not fond of having to deal with a third set of equipment. I'm not exactly
comfortable going with HP, but I'd like some data to help resolve the
debate.
So my questions to the NANOG community are: Would you recommend HP over
Cisco or Juniper? How is HP's functionality and performance compared to
Cisco or Juniper? Does anyone have any HP networking experiences they can
share, good or bad?
This situation scares me. It has HP "best interest" written all over it.
You have expertise in competing vendors but not with HP/3Com. They could very
well be easy to configure but maybe inferior when you get into the details of
how they function. Then if you find out they can't support your business needs,
it would cost even more to replace them. I don't think that's going to happen,
I'm sure the people writing the checks will tell you to make it work, but if it can't
meet the demands, it's going to hurt your business...
The people writing the checks need to know this. I'm not against new companies
competing with Cisco/Juniper but at the same time, you don't want to be the guinea pigs
for them....
A couple consulting gigs I did had 3Com stuff since it was cheap and they
got educational deals. They were consulting me to put in Cisco gear This
was admittedly 3-4 years ago.
I've never met anyone who has told me positive stories about 3Com equipment,
but I suppose I'm biased also from the horror stories.
> From a technical point of view, I have never worked in a shop that used HP
or 3Com for the infrastructure. Dot-com's, telco's, bank's, hosting
companies...I haven't seen any of them using 3com or HP. Additionally, I'm
not fond of having to deal with a third set of equipment. I'm not exactly
comfortable going with HP, but I'd like some data to help resolve the
debate.
I work with networking products from all of the mentioned vendors on a daily basis. HP Networking (was ProCurve) make a solid SME switching product, it is comparable to Cisco 2000/3000 series switches, they also have chassis switches such as the 54xx/82xx, however these lack a lot of the more advanced features available from Cisco and Juniper, and have significant hardware limitations e.g. backplane bandwidth. HP also do not have decent stackable switches, which will be a concern if you want to split LACP trunks across multiple switches/chassis.
Another major negative with the HP gear for us is that their switches only support SFP/SFP+ modules manufactured by HP, so those SFP+ Twin-AX cables that came with your Dell/IBM Blade chassis will be useless to connect to your HP Switches, to add insult HP often sell their own modules at 3x the price of an equivalent module from say Extreme or Juniper.
So my questions to the NANOG community are: Would you recommend HP over
Cisco or Juniper? How is HP's functionality and performance compared to
Cisco or Juniper? Does anyone have any HP networking experiences they can
share, good or bad?
My reccomendation would be, use Juniper for Core and Aggregation with ProCurve at the edge.
I have never used 3Com or HP equipment in an infrastucture / mission critical enviornment so I will not attest to their qualities or failures. What I can tell you about is HP's recent acquisition of 3Com in my opinion had little to do with HP wanting to get into a core switch/routing market.
Shortly before HP purchased 3Com I had the chance to meet Mark Hurd and listen to him talk about the direction HP was moving. At that time it seemed HP was not interested in the enterprise switch/routing market. I think Mark said something like, "Cisco/Juniper has that market all tied up so we are not going to go there." Instead, HP is very very intenetly focused on services. Especially enterprise services. This fits in very nicely with their new UCS (I don't remember what they call their version) blade enclosures. HP needed better switching / routing modules for their unified archtecture. These products come heavily laden with services. Anyone who has SANs, blade chassis, or routing/switching chassis knows the service contracts are enormously expesive. Sometimes half the cost of the system can be the service contract. 3Com also brought something else HP needed. A VOIP handset line. HP has partnered with Microsoft for their unified communication strategy and they do not have a phone. This may be acceptable in some enviornments, but many businesses go "What, no phone?" and kick them out the door. That is what happened with my company when Mircosoft pitched their UC system to us. We simply have too many "high up" users who would show the IT department the door if they didn't have a desk phone. (yes I understand you can add phones, but the package ends up looking like a hodgepodge of services) 3Com has phones and handsets and HP needed those if they want their UCS to compete with the new Cisco UCS.
When we evaulate vendors for products we use these great big spreadsheets where we define metrics for everything we can thing of. Every product we evaluate we also look deeply at the company as well. My biggest concern with using HP in the core is if they are actually serious about being in the core or are they just going to let that product unit die over time.
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.
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.
Not to stir the pot, but Extreme is making some good products at a low
cost and have lifetime warranties. I've been using them lately in the
end-user edge as lower cost POE termination. They do LLDP-MED
flawlessly so Cisco, or other phones get their voice vlan and pass the
data vlan. Now, they are missing some of the prime-time features found
in J and C which is why I wouldn't recommend them in the agg or core.
Haven't seen these same issues either, but have seen others..
We use HP 8212's here to connect our storage and hpc devices. each 8212 has about 20 or more 10Gbit connections. Everyone is happy with them from an availability and performance perspective. Two things which I noticed, 1. Under heavy load (60% or more of 10Gbit interfaces at +80%) we have seen _all_ interfaces simultaneously drop packets and generate interface errors. this was on an early release of the firmware and I don't think we have seen this problem in awhile. 2. each module only has about 28 Gbits of bandwidth to the backplane. this means if you want non blocking 10Gbit access to the backplan you can only load up an 8212 50% of its physical port capacity with active links.
Very recently they changed licensing, the 8212's use to ship with premium licenses included. this gave you OSPF, PIM VRRP and QinQ. without a product number change or other clear indication, these no longer are included but must be purchased separately. This was a bit of a let down as we use OSPF internally and was one of the items that made the 8212's interesting when deciding what we would standardize on for access switches.
We also use 6509e's for our core routers, they use to be the only routers till we deployed OSPF. On the internet edge we use ASRs.
The 'H3C' switches they recently acquired look nice(r).
To be fair, each platform seems to vary quite a bit in quality and reliability. I have seen some HP installs work ok, but they were primarily edge switches or bladecenter switches.
I would also add Brocade/Foundry to the mix as well. We've been deploying these switches with great results. Since the IOS is very similar to Cisco's, the transition has been quite easy.
We have plenty of Foundry gear and we've never had to pay anything to
read the manuals for them. Then again, we bought it all new, so it came
with printed manuals.
There's a 1000+ page manual on the management software itself.
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.
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