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  1. #1
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    L2 Switches......Cisco, Dell and HP

    we are a small shop...
    Not looking to buy another switch but we have a crapshoot of switches around. Dell 5448, HP 2910 and a Cisco 3560.

    I'd like to keep the the Cisco back in HQ stock since it's a POE switch.

    We are colocating just 1 SAN intially. Max of maybe 7-8 Servers total in the future. Not alot of bandwidth and doing L2 traffic only. Any issues with either the Dell or HP in the colo environment from a production standpoint. We have used a couple of Procurves in our environment, and the dell switches were freebies that were part of our last order.

    Basically, it would look like this

    ASA5510 serving as main headed VPN
    2 Branch Offices connecting to it
    One L2 Switch. 2 - 3 Seperate Vlans with a trunk port back out to the ASA5510

  2. #2
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    I would definitely lean towards the HP if you'd like to reserve the Cisco for other use. Most people will agree Procurves are extremely solid L2 switches.

  3. #3
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    Quote Originally Posted by voipcarrier View Post
    I would definitely lean towards the HP if you'd like to reserve the Cisco for other use. Most people will agree Procurves are extremely solid L2 switches.
    Absolutely concur there.

    --Chris
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  4. #4
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    The HP is a great switch but since you are only looking for L2 functionality the Dell would work great and you will get a much better price from Dell on that switch. Make sure if you buy from Dell do not use there website. Get a sales rep assinged to you and in most cases you will get better prices. We just bought a 5448 and paid less than 600.00 for the switch shipped. We use it as a management switch that is uplinked to a L3 switch.

  5. #5
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    Quote Originally Posted by WickedShark View Post
    The HP is a great switch but since you are only looking for L2 functionality the Dell would work great and you will get a much better price from Dell on that switch. Make sure if you buy from Dell do not use there website. Get a sales rep assinged to you and in most cases you will get better prices. We just bought a 5448 and paid less than 600.00 for the switch shipped. We use it as a management switch that is uplinked to a L3 switch.
    The Dell 5224 was one of the worst gigabit switches I ever owned. It had lots of bugs in it's firmware and generally caused network havoc at LAN Parties which I used to use it for. Perhaps newer model switches are not manufactured by the same OEM, or possibly they finally got their bugs worked out, but I'm not interested in revisiting bad experiences.

    We replaced our Dell 5224 with the HP Procurve 2824 and couldn't be more pleased with it's performance. The 2824 is an amazing switch - not sure if you can buy that model new anymore, but they go for ~$450 on eBay. A great deal for the money given their lifetime warranties.

    --Chris
    The Object Zone - Your Windows Server Specialists for more than twenty years - http://www.object-zone.net/
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  6. #6
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    Yes like I agreed the HP switch would be better but more expensive. We just use our 5448 switch for a management network so it is not like we are pounding it all the time. We have no issues with it but once again we do not use it for the primary network either.

  7. #7
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    Wicked...that 5448 for $600 must be volume/relationship pricing. We get discounts from our Dell rep, but not 33% off...

  8. #8
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    We get up to 40% off a lot of Dell stuff (Gold Team), but I wouldn't use any of their switches in a datacenter environment even if they were free. Maybe for an office, but nothing mission critical.

  9. #9
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    I concur with the negative sentiment towards Dell switches. We employ a number of them (even ones with CLI support) and they are just plain horrible to manage.

    HP is decent but you have to be careful to preserve feature set capability so you don't grow out of them too quickly (we found after the fact that our HP1800 switches lack the ability to actually 802.1Q trunk... doh!)

    Out of the three mentioned here, Cisco to me would be the best. But I hate Cisco (despite using a ton of it), so I'm going to recommend a "#4"... Juniper EX3200. Low cost, high functionality, loads of backplane... and a pleasure to configure. And it beats a Cisco 3750G any day of the week. And if you want even lower cost, the EX2200's should be out very soon.
    Dan Farrell
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  10. #10
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    Avoid HP like the plague. All of the 1U stackable switches have dubious capabilities in regards to spanning tree, especially when interoperating with Cisco's. Dells are cheap crap but people have fun with them

    I just stopped buying anything from non-major networking vendors, not worth the hassle. The money you "save" by buying the cheap gear is by far surpassed by the time spent debugging issues.
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  11. #11
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    Quote Originally Posted by appliedops View Post
    Avoid HP like the plague. All of the 1U stackable switches have dubious capabilities in regards to spanning tree, especially when interoperating with Cisco's. Dells are cheap crap but people have fun with them

    I just stopped buying anything from non-major networking vendors, not worth the hassle. The money you "save" by buying the cheap gear is by far surpassed by the time spent debugging issues.
    HP Procurve switches have been around forever, and for good reason. I'm curious on the specifics of your disregard for HP? You mention spanning tree - it is disabled by default, but is easily turned on. In fact, HP Procurve was first to ship Rapid-STP (RSTP) an it's switches and let me tell you, RSTP is an amazing add to an Enterprise switch. I tested a number of fail-over situations with cascading between a HP 2824, HP 2626, and even some old unmanaged Dell 2124 switches and the HP made everyone run so smoothly. I can't imagine why they wouldn't interoperate with Cisco?

    --Chris
    The Object Zone - Your Windows Server Specialists for more than twenty years - http://www.object-zone.net/
    Services: Contract Server Management, Desktop Support Services, IT/VoIP Consulting, Cloud Migration, and Custom ASP.net and Mobile Application Development

  12. #12
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    Quote Originally Posted by appliedops View Post
    Avoid HP like the plague. All of the 1U stackable switches have dubious capabilities in regards to spanning tree, especially when interoperating with Cisco's. Dells are cheap crap but people have fun with them

    I just stopped buying anything from non-major networking vendors, not worth the hassle. The money you "save" by buying the cheap gear is by far surpassed by the time spent debugging issues.
    I would hardly consider HP a "non-major vendor" and I think most people who have deployed ProCurve equipment would strongly disagree with you. We have never had any of their 1U or chassis switches have interoperability issues with Cisco equipment.

    The earlier comments about the 1800-series feature sets are true, they are web-managed switches. They aren't really in the same league as the fully managed lines.

    This is turning into an HP versus Cisco debate. The bottom line is - don't use the Dell. Either the HP or Cisco are great choices.

  13. #13
    Is Procurve 1800 suitable for about 10-20 servers? Is it possible to do traffic shaping with the built-in QOS?

  14. #14
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    Logging into one of my 1800's now I see no QOS options whatsoever. But for 10 to 20 servers you are probably fine, especially if you don't expect any of them to push full line rate (1 Gbps) consistently. It has SNMP capabilities that the comparable Dell switch does not, and it allows for LACP trunks (but I'm not sure who uses those these days.)
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  15. #15
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    We use switches from each of these vendors in production, as well as from Riverstone (now A/L) and Juniper. Of all 5 vendors, I'd have to say I'm happiest with Juniper. It's true carrier-grade switching and routing. While you pay the price (~$3k for a 24-port EX3200) it's so worth it. It beats any non-chassis-based non-stackable Catalyst, and the EX4200 is the stackable Catalyst-killer.

    They are coming out with the EX2200 (I believe sometime this year) that will only be a switch (no routing) with full line-rate on every port (24-port Gigabit.) The EX2500 will do the same thing, but at 10Gbps.
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  16. #16
    Quote Originally Posted by ai-danno View Post
    Logging into one of my 1800's now I see no QOS options whatsoever. But for 10 to 20 servers you are probably fine, especially if you don't expect any of them to push full line rate (1 Gbps) consistently. It has SNMP capabilities that the comparable Dell switch does not, and it allows for LACP trunks (but I'm not sure who uses those these days.)
    Hi,

    Can you confirm on this?

    I check on Procurve's website and 1800 Series do comes with QOS.

    http://www.procurve.com/products/swi...s/overview.htm

    Quality of Service (QoS)

    * Traffic prioritization: honors priority of traffic based on IEEE 802.1p to deliver data to devices based on the priority and type of traffic

    * Broadcast control: allows limitation of broadcast traffic rate to cut down on unwanted broadcast traffic on the network
    How do I know if a switch is able to do traffic shaping down to the Mbps?

    TIA.

  17. #17
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    OK, you could've done this yourself, but I did it for you .

    1) Traffic Prioritizaion is 'honored'- That means you can configure nothing in the switch itself. If it receives 802.1p frames of various sorts, it will honor their markings as frames egress the switch, but you cannot tag/classify frames from the switch itself. A search for 'qos' in the document revealed nothing.

    2) Broadcast / Multicast control- can only be limited in terms of thousands of frames per second on the entire switch. Cannot be tuned in terms of Mbps, or in terms of per-port.

    Therefore, you cannot shape traffic itself with this switch. You cannot classify traffic from this switch. You can't even use VLAN trunks on this switch (a major disapppointment for us) which would allow for multiple VLAN segments that uplink to a core switching device.

    The switches, in terms of performance, have caused no issues- they were fire and forget. But in terms of being able to do cool stuff with them, they are terrible. The only reason we got them is because they were cheaper than the Dell equivalent and could be polled for SNMP (unlike the Dell) for our traffic graphing purposes.

    This is not indicative of their higher-end switches. We use 4900-series switches and love them- tons of features and rock-solid.
    Dan Farrell
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  18. #18
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    The Juniper EX2x00 series won't be out until 1Q10 at the earliest, and most likely 2Q10.

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