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?