Core switch - Where to buy and maybe what to buy

[CAWJames]

Morning all,

 

We have just expanded in our building from a few rooms to the whole 29,000 sq-ft of it, and strangely enough need to upgrade the switching!

 

After looking at the options, I am "pretty sure" I want a Procurce 5400 switch, probably the 6 slot rather the 12. Reasoning being I want 10Gbe to link edges around the building but I also want gigabit switching in the server room, so thought modular is the way to go. Or am i doing it wrong, and should be going 48 port stack with 40Gbe between and 10GBe out?

 

Where do us educational types go to get Procurve equipment for a decent edu discount(if such a thing exists)? or other options appreciated of course?

 

Thanks, any help appreciated?

 

Thanks

 

James

[FN-GM]

Is there any particular reason you are going HP? A friend of mine in his school had all HP. They needed to replace the lot, Cisco switches came in a help of a lot cheaper than HP. He got 10GB to all servers, 2 x core switches, and 20GB to all edge stacks. The edge stacks are Cisco 2960X and the Core switches are Cisco 4500X. Although Cisco does have a limited life time warranty, You will be good for another 10 years at least.

 

Just thought I would throw it in as many people jump to HP assuming its cheaper.

 

Thanks

Edited August 24, 2015 by FN-GM

[CAWJames]

No particular swing to HP, just we have a chassis switch at our other centre, that has done the job with the lifetime warranty, and I assumed that Cisco would come in a lot more expensive, as they always used to look good on paper until you needed to buy extra software licences to enable features that were standard on other switches(but I will probably stand corrected!).

 

Thanks

 

James

[Davit2005]

We considered Cisco to replace some older HP's, the main cost issue was the Support for us

 

The actual hardware came out cheaper, we were torn between HP 3800 & Cisco 3850's.

Edited August 24, 2015 by Davit2005

[CAWJames]

Hoi everyone,

 

Thanks for the comments, Cisco do seem to load with software add-ons and support!

 

Does anyone know if the HP 5400 zl is going EOL, and should we be looking at the 5400R zl2 instead going forward, if we do go HP?

 

Thanks

 

James

[psydii]

I recommend Switchshop.

[john]

If you are open to options also look at Juniper... @Net-Ctrl did a great setup in my last place with the Juniper switches and cost of that kit was not anywhere near as bad as anyone though it would be it beat HP and Cisco price wise at the time

[CAWJames]

Always open to other options!

[Marshall_IT]

Lan3 and extreme networks switches.

Great support and great product.

[njc235]

Just remember that a chassis doesn't have to be a physical chassis. HP's IRF system allows you to create a Virtual chassis consisting of two or more physical units which can be geographically separated for DR and resilience purposes. A typical deployment would be two buildings within a school campus connected with OM3 or 4 with one or more IRF switch in each thereby creating the virtual chassis in two places. Many switches are available in the HP Comware range to do this. The 5800 is a common choice. When you start to add the modules in a 5400 the price soon ramps up to meet and indeed exceed that of a couple of 5800s which come in all flavours (24G, 48G, SFP, POE etc) but all have 4 x SFP+ ports built in. Two are used for IRF connectivity but a further 4 can be added via expansion cards.

 

HTH

[john]

Just remember that a chassis doesn't have to be a physical chassis. HP's IRF system allows you to create a Virtual chassis consisting of two or more physical units which can be geographically separated for DR and resilience purposes. A typical deployment would be two buildings within a school campus connected with OM3 or 4 with one or more IRF switch in each thereby creating the virtual chassis in two places. Many switches are available in the HP Comware range to do this. The 5800 is a common choice. When you start to add the modules in a 5400 the price soon ramps up to meet and indeed exceed that of a couple of 5800s which come in all flavours (24G, 48G, SFP, POE etc) but all have 4 x SFP+ ports built in. Two are used for IRF connectivity but a further 4 can be added via expansion cards.

 

HTH

 

Indeed the Juniper stuff that I had for my core was Virtual Chassis so we had 3 on one site and 2 on the other stacked together in a virtual chassis and was great well worth a look at. Here is the case study we did with Juniper Settle College Uses EX Series Ethernet Switches to Improve Its Network - Juniper Networks

[Ric_]

@CAWJames The 5400zl is not going EOL but the 5400R zl2 is amazing if you can stretch to it - the 5400zl is limited to 40Gbps per module and only offers single management controllers whilst the 5400R zl2 has 80Gbps per module (make sure you get the v3 10gig modules to support this) and can have redundant management controllers too. As you said, both of these come with the HP lifetime warranty which is the biggest saving over Cisco. IIRC the 5800 series doesn't have the lifetime warranty. We recently chose the 5800R zl2 over a 5800 stack because it worked out fractionally cheaper once we factored in losing 10 gig ports for linking the switches and buying cables. I personally prefer the ProView CLI to the H3C CLI too and it's handy to standardise.

[njc235]

IIRC the 5800 series doesn't have the lifetime warranty.

 

 

This is incorrect. See below

 

What's in the box

• (1) HP 5800-24G-PoE+ Switch
  

Warranty

• Limited Lifetime warranty: Advance hardware replacement with next-business-day delivery (available in most countries). See www.hp.com/networking/warrantysummary for duration details.
  
• Electronic and telephone support: limited electronic and telephone support is available from HP- for details on the duration of support provided with your product purchase
  
• refer to www.hp.com/networking/warrantysummary.
  
• Software releases: for details on the software releases available with your product purchase
  
• refer to www.hp.com/networking/warrantysummary.
  

[IanT]

Vote for HP here, installed quite a few HP 5406 zl Switch with Premium (J9642A), I always find Cisco rather exspensive

[Ric_]

@njc235 My bad... you are correct... I was thinking of the 5820 series which was the alternative that I had been looking at since I had a far higher 10-gig requirement.

[njc235]

@Ric_ If you have a higher 10G requirement, you could look at the 5900 which, whilst it does not have the LW2, there are some fairly inexpensive NBD carepacks available which can work out at around £200/year if your reseller works hard enough on HP for you.

HTH

[Ric_]

@Ric_ If you have a higher 10G requirement, you could look at the 5900 which, whilst it does not have the LW2, there are some fairly inexpensive NBD carepacks available which can work out at around £200/year if your reseller works hard enough on HP for you.

HTH

 

My requirements are very different... I no longer work in education and had very specific requirements with both high SFP+ and Gig-T port counts. We also have to maintain the CTR carepacks on our switchgear.

[ITGURU]

I'm surprised to read Cisco is cheaper than HP

I don't see Cisco being any more reliable than other manufacturers.

 

I still have a Chassis Core Switch that's still in full working order after 9 years supply our 10 gig links to edge switches.

We're fully D-Link for Core, Edge and Managed Wireless.

[nelliott]

If you are open to options also look at Juniper... @Net-Ctrl did a great setup in my last place with the Juniper switches and cost of that kit was not anywhere near as bad as anyone though it would be it beat HP and Cisco price wise at the time

 

I had Juniper switches in a previous school and we was always having issues with them, in particular data loss if we lost power to the building!

[john]

I had Juniper switches in a previous school and we was always having issues with them, in particular data loss if we lost power to the building!

 

Never saw that with any of ours and ours suffered a major building project so lost power frequently in areas (very annoying!) but never had any issues with the switches at all.

[cpjitservices]

We Use Juniper, and wouldnt use anything else. Nothing but solidarity and reliability here, and marginally cheaper than other offerings.