For large campuses that have a lot (hundreds) of switches, Cisco seems to win out over HP from a TCO standpoint. I've consistently seen HP switches have higher failure rates, which isn't a big deal if you're a smaller shop, but when you have a large campus (or several large campuses across a state in our case) the man-power that you need to run around and do equipment swaps adds up pretty quick. I think what we do using about 10 people in a Cisco environment would be closer to 20 in an HP and Juniper environment, so those additional salaries and benefits need to be a factor. Cisco VTP is a killer app for VLAN management IMHO, but only for campus deployments, really. If you're a service provider you probably will be running in transparent mode. As far as Cisco's failure rate... I'm not proud of it, but given that we're a public institution and limited in funding we still have a large amount of 3500 XL series switches that have been running for 10+ years without failure in harsh environments (old buildings, boiler rooms...). It's nice to have that level of dependability in hardware and it certainly makes our lives easier. To be fair, I don't know many large HP deployments anymore as most of them have moved to Cisco, so I'd be interested in hearing from people who run an HP shop for a campus. The pricing and warranty seem hard to resist, but if the failure rates are still high it's hard to make a case. On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 5:55 PM, Carl Rosevear <crosevear@skytap.com> wrote:
That's strange, I abhor the Cisco way of doing VLANs and love the HP/Procurve method.
What do you find so irritating?
I find it irritating because I am often running thousands of vlans and do not want to explicitly type them all out in the config or to have to do so with a script. `switch trunk allowed vlan 2-3000` is much more awesome, for me.
---Carl
-- Ray Soucy Epic Communications Specialist Phone: +1 (207) 561-3526 Networkmaine, a Unit of the University of Maine System http://www.networkmaine.net/