New Core Switch Suggestions

[glennda]

I'm in a similar position to the OP. I've been wondering why the 5406 and 5412 switches are more popular than stacked switches? I'm thinking that a stacked core would give us better redundancy than a chassis. I'm a bit worried about having a single management module and chassis as a single point of failure. I hope I don't sound like i'm second guessing anyone else's choices, I'm just trying to figure out what's best for my school.

 

How do people find the 54xx series in terms of reliability?

 

My one had a faulty management module flash card - although I couldn't make any configuration changes the switch carried on switching/routing for all the vlans. I also had an SFP module fail which didn't crash the switch. Apart from the obvious of not switching to the areas connected to the module.

[dgsmith]

I only wish we could find the money to replace a 2810-24G that we're using as our core switch..

 

Isn't even capable of routing vlans =(

[Chris_Cook]

Why not look at the 8212zl then?? this has redundant management modules and fabric modules. it will also carry on switching traffic while the fabric/management modules are failing over if primary one should fail.

I've looked at it briefly, but by the time its kitted out with PSUs and switch modules, it seems like quite a large sum of money.

[cpjitservices]

If your on a tight budget check out the Junipers, they are reliable, robust, expandable and really built very well. We use the EX2200's here bearing in mind I come from a Nortel background the Junipers are very different. They are great to work with, either through CLI or Web Interface.

 

I'll attach screenshots of the web gui because i think it's fantastic.

 

 

I believe the Juniper EX2200's are fairly cheap - prices will have changed since we bought ours 8 months ago but still might be worth checking out, there is also some other people on here using Juniper.

 

Cheers.

[nicholab]

Juniper EX4500 or Cisco Catalyst 3750 both seem to be good core switches and they are stackable. Edited September 4, 2012 by nicholab

[cpjitservices]

The 3750's are also fantastic switches!!

[snoerre]

So, you want to buy one(?) core switch. Looking at the HP 8200 series, it can be equipped with two fabric and management modules, is advertised with non stop switching as well. Also, if you want 10GB interfaces, take the V2 hardware and get the premium software.

HP.pdf

Edited September 11, 2012 by snoerre

[bio]

Cisco 4506E's over here. 2 x 10 GB link between them. VERY happy with them (running 6 months solid now. (before we had 3com 5500Gs).

 

bio..

[sonofsanta]

I looked at this back around Easter, going from an aging 3COM 5500G with 3Coms everywhere else... had quotes on the Juniper kit (nice, but the SFP modules were prohibitively expensive, and would have meant a lot of cost rolling forward and replacing switches elsewhere), a HP 5406 (massively expensive in and of itself) and a pair of stacked HP A5800s. We went with the latter as the pricing was the cheapest, the performance was more than good enough, we could reuse 3COM SFPs, and we could stick fibre modules in the back which gave us 32 fibre ports over the two switches. This on a similar size network, 450 devices, 1200 users, the only thing we don't have is the VOIP.

 

We also rolled out some A5120s at the same time to select edge cabinets and they've been brilliant as well. We have redundant links back to the core from the new edge switches with gobs of bandwidth and we've been able to properly VLAN everything off. It's all worked a charm, and SwitchShop were superb.

 

PM me if you want to know more, anywho, but as much as everyone loves the HP ProCurve kit, you don't half pay the HP tax on it and the A series stuff has been flawless for me.

[apeman]

Just for anyone who is interested i had a quote last week for a HP 5406zl with premium license, 1x 20port Gig-T PoE+ & 2SFP+, 1x 24port Gig-T PoE+ and 1x 1500w power supply for a little over £2600 (combined part number J9533A)

 

Which i think is a great price unless anyone can get it cheaper

[glennda]

Just for anyone who is interested i had a quote last week for a HP 5406zl with premium license, 1x 20port Gig-T PoE+ & 2SFP+, 1x 24port Gig-T PoE+ and 1x 1500w power supply for a little over £2600 (combined part number J9533A)

 

Which i think is a great price unless anyone can get it cheaper

 

See what @Millgate can do

[SYNACK]

Just for anyone who is interested i had a quote last week for a HP 5406zl with premium license, 1x 20port Gig-T PoE+ & 2SFP+, 1x 24port Gig-T PoE+ and 1x 1500w power supply for a little over £2600 (combined part number J9533A)

 

Which i think is a great price unless anyone can get it cheaper

 

We just chucked one of those - 5412zl - in admittedly with more modules but for a lot more (stupid global ripoff merchants). Great switch though, epic fast with the ability to be configured to do whatever we need it to. Pulled a couple of Cisco 3750 units that were the previous core, also epic switches which acted as a fautless core for 8 years and are still decent spec even today.

 

We went modular for the reconfigurability and the 1TB backplain which makes even 20GB interlinks look miniscule. It also has dual PSUs and can easily run as a core and the access layer for our largest catchment area.

[Mr.Ben]

An update - I went for the 5406zl, with premium licence, two power supplies, one 8 Port 10Gb module, one 24 port 1Gb SPF Module and one 24 port 1Gb-T Module. It's awesome!

 

Next up for the new job: virtualisation!

[apeman]

Yes the 5412zl is normally a lot more

 

I hope people will post the prices they paid for the kit (if they can or want to) just so others on the forum can see what deals can be had

[dgsmith]

Why do some schools have so much money??.. we have to make a hard decision over whether to get a fax machine that costs £89 or one that costs £169, purely for financial reasons!

 

I also can't see us being able to replace the 2810-24G switch we use at the core any time soon, unless we can justify another ebay purchase.

[bossman]

@dgsmith:

 

We still running with Cisco 3550 12G as core and a combination of 3550 and 3650 48 port edge switches, been running these for 10 years now and I don't see our school being able to replace them yet, if we do it will be Juniper all round although I would still use Cisco again as they have been so solid.

 

Some schools do seem to find lots of money don't they or is it because they pay their teaching staff basic wages hehe!

[Rural]

@dgsmith and @bossman:

 

I hear you. We have a bunch of small schools (40 to 800 students, 50-500 ports) and much of the kit discussed in this thread is well beyond our means.

 

We upgraded our network from a bunch of D-Link FastEthernet switches to D-Link GigE switches two years ago. Getting the money for that was a real challenge. The new switches were capable of link aggregation so we used it, thinking it would help avoid bottle-necks. This summer we had a summer student test the throughput and we realized the switches were topping out at 1.6Gbps per bonded link. Didn't matter if you had four ports in the bond, 1.6Gbps was what you got. Since almost all of our servers have 2 or 4 GigE ports, we've been shopping for GigE switches that can do VLANs, link aggregation (802.3ad), and not much else. Tested an HP V1910 last week (and had troubles with it). So now we're looking again but spending anywhere close to $3k on a switch is going to be a tough sell.

[glennda]

what was wrong with the v1910? have you looked at a 2810 or 2910?

[Achandler]

We use D-Link in the core purely for financial reasons, and I do sometimes wonder how some schools can afford the expensive switches.

 

But if you try to understand school funding then it is odd in itself, money for some subjects is better then others, then you have the social deprivation funds to, and pupil premiums that some schools get while others don't. The staff costs can also be massively different, some schools have staff that have all been there 5+ years and are at the top of scales, others staff are newer and are nearer the bottom of scales.

 

All the above is before anyone even decides where the money the school does get should be spent! So I do get an idea of how budgets can vary massively, even within the same borough.

[SYNACK]

@dgsmith:

 

We still running with Cisco 3550 12G as core and a combination of 3550 and 3650 48 port edge switches, been running these for 10 years now and I don't see our school being able to replace them yet, if we do it will be Juniper all round although I would still use Cisco again as they have been so solid.

 

Some schools do seem to find lots of money don't they or is it because they pay their teaching staff basic wages hehe!

 

It depends heavily on the school, the way it is structured and the type of funding it gets. I deal with several schools and the smallest has the best budget, you'd probably cry if you knew how much we spent on switching this year - hint it is in the 10s of Ks.

 

The bigger ones are structured and populated differently and have different goals so we have to scrimp a lot more. We did used to go D-Link but after the amount of trouble they caused we realised that cost wise it was not worth 'saving' the money on purchase if we needed to spend twice or more the saving on my time cleaning up after the bloody things. The downtime was also not cool.

 

Messing with the different networks at different levels you can definatly 'feel' the difference when imaging a machine or installing something. Schools with the tidy back end gear can sit there mashing the HD of a batch of machines full tach while still serving the rest of the school normally. Other places we do imaging in smaller batches or out of hours as the shear throughput bogs down the network noticeably. Everything still runs but you know something is up. Diagnostics are another big thing, schools with the shiny gear the answers are usually a telnet or console session away, quite a bit I can even remedy completely remotely resetting certain components or pointing out the exact point of failure. The others need that bit of extra presence and kicking to get the answers and fixes out.

 

Warranty is the other thing, the school with the big switches now has all their network gear under lifetime warranty. That means that other than upgrades in future the network is sorted. In the other places there is still a state of flux and fluid budgeting to stay ahead of the next great excrement storm.

 

There are merits to both ways but I have to say that I prefer overkill to under kill any day of the decade, let alone the week. In saying that the Cisco stuff is a perfect example of the overkill method, sure you can get away with a D-Link for the 9 months or so that it works reliably but a Cisco will happily work reliably for ten years and only cost about four times as much, cost benefit wise the Cisco/HP/Other Solid Vendor is a better choice if you can swing the budget to buy into the 'dream'. As I said in another thread, we just pulled an 8 year old Cisco core which still makes other schools jealous for its ability, we pulled it to go bigger not because anything was wrong with it.

Edited October 31, 2012 by SYNACK

[Rural]

@glennda: The issue with the v1910 is that it doesn't seem to want to talk to our existing switching infrastructure if VLANs are involved. Actually, it is more complicated than that. It worked fine until I made the v1910's web interface available on another VLAN. It became intermittent at that point. Upgrading the firmware on the v1910 introduced a weird certificate problem. (Firefox won't trust it and refuses to allow an exception.) I'm curious if the v1910 came along with the 3COM acquisition.

 

And more generally, just so I don't unduly bias someone against D-Link gear, I should say that we have generally been happy with their switches. We have about 24 DGS-1248T and 10 DGS-1210-48 switches in service. These are fairly low-end "web-smart" switches. Just basic features (VLANs, link-aggregation, 802.1x, etc.) accessible through a web interface. Other than the crappy link aggregation performance, the occasional lock up while messing with stuff over the web interface, and the fans needing to be replaced right around the end of the warranty period, we've had little to complain about. I'm hoping to keep most of them in service on the edge. (Of course, our networks are almost all edge. Not much of a core to speak of yet.) We've probably had to reboot switches three or four times since we started using them. Knock on wood, we've had no failed ports.

 

To put this in perspective: We do absolutely the opposite of over-building. It has mostly worked. Where it doesn't, we either suffer or find work-arounds. As an example, I've been replacing old Cisco routers with commodity rack-mount PCs running pfSense. It has worked very well for us. I'm also experimenting with building Linux routers/firewalls and have generally been very happy with the flexibility this brings at very small cost. When it comes to security (ie. firewalls), I actually feel strongly that one needs the source. Other than that, I'm not advocating what we do. Not at all. Our budget imposes this approach upon us.

 

[snip]

 

Messing with the different networks at different levels you can definatly 'feel' the difference when imaging a machine or installing something. Schools with the tidy back end gear can sit there mashing the HD of a batch of machines full tach while still serving the rest of the school normally. Other places we do imaging in smaller batches or out of hours as the shear throughput bogs down the network noticeably. Everything still runs but you know something is up. Diagnostics are another big thing, schools with the shiny gear the answers are usually a telnet or console session away, quite a bit I can even remedy completely remotely resetting certain components or pointing out the exact point of failure. The others need that bit of extra presence and kicking to get the answers and fixes out.

 

Warranty is the other thing, the school with the big switches now has all their network gear under lifetime warranty. That means that other than upgrades in future the network is sorted. In the other places there is still a state of flux and fluid budgeting to stay ahead of the next great excrement storm.

 

There are merits to both ways but I have to say that I prefer overkill to under kill any day of the decade, let alone the week. In saying that the Cisco stuff is a perfect example of the overkill method, sure you can get away with a D-Link for the 9 months or so that it works reliably but a Cisco will happily work reliably for ten years and only cost about four times as much, cost benefit wise the Cisco/HP/Other Solid Vendor is a better choice if you can swing the budget to buy into the 'dream'. As I said in another thread, we just pulled an 8 year old Cisco core which still makes other schools jealous for its ability, we pulled it to go bigger not because anything was wrong with it.

[pantscat]

Procurve 5406zl is perfect, I've got a 5412zl... which I only got because of a very good deal.

 

I'm thinking about getting a 5406zl so that I've got redundancy at the core.

[SYNACK]

@glennda: The issue with the v1910 is that it doesn't seem to want to talk to our existing switching infrastructure if VLANs are involved. Actually, it is more complicated than that. It worked fine until I made the v1910's web interface available on another VLAN. It became intermittent at that point. Upgrading the firmware on the v1910 introduced a weird certificate problem. (Firefox won't trust it and refuses to allow an exception.) I'm curious if the v1910 came along with the 3COM acquisition.

 

And more generally, just so I don't unduly bias someone against D-Link gear, I should say that we have generally been happy with their switches. We have about 24 DGS-1248T and 10 DGS-1210-48 switches in service. These are fairly low-end "web-smart" switches. Just basic features (VLANs, link-aggregation, 802.1x, etc.) accessible through a web interface. Other than the crappy link aggregation performance, the occasional lock up while messing with stuff over the web interface, and the fans needing to be replaced right around the end of the warranty period, we've had little to complain about. I'm hoping to keep most of them in service on the edge. (Of course, our networks are almost all edge. Not much of a core to speak of yet.) We've probably had to reboot switches three or four times since we started using them. Knock on wood, we've had no failed ports.

 

Eep, you have been VERY lucky, we had a stack of DGS-1248T units, both versions and without fail every single one of them has become unstable, dropped ports, impeeded multicast and broadcast traffic, sounded like jet engines and expired within two years if not completely, to the point that it was not worth giving them power any more.

 

I tend to prefer discrete hardware like routers simply because it has a manual and you don't need to spend a week or two pulling apart the source code to figure out WTH its actually doing or where the irksom little config file is actually hidden. They also burn many times less power, make less noise and take less space.

 

I'm a little harsh on stuff like this as I have wasted far too much of my life cleaning up such setups when the person who hexed and cursed the whole thing together moves on and leaves the school holding the completely unmanagable bag. Uniformatity does have its benifits and transferability is one of them, sure you can get around a bunch of it with propper documentation but a discrete system is almost always going to be easier.

[snoerre]

@glennda: Upgrading the firmware on the v1910 introduced a weird certificate problem. (Firefox won't trust it and refuses to allow an exception.) I'm curious if the v1910 came along with the 3COM acquisition.

Did you try going CLI?

at 3COM CLI

_cmdline-mode on

[password is] 512900

 

What I really like about this switch. This one gets upgrades, upgrades and upgrades: https://h10145.www1.hp.com/downloads/SoftwareReleases.aspx?ProductNumber=JE006A&lang=&cc=&prodSeriesId=

 

But, I have that switch since it was released years ago and there are bugs.

 

Talking about HP or H3C, they throw in feature by feature, but they really don´t fix their bugs and security holes, although they are tested and confirmed by hp networking support team in GB. Of course, I´m not a big customer at all. But I really hate it when I´m either told to wait for the next release again and again, or that the next level hasn´t looked at the problem at all.

 

So, what would be the next step forward? So please give me an alternative to a V1910? Perhaps with some SFP+

Edited October 31, 2012 by snoerre

[Rural]

@snoerre: I'd read about opening up the CLI on the v1910, but haven't tried it yet. My opinion is is that the web-interface should work as advertised. It would also be nice if a web-interface could be used for most configuration. My staff tends to get scared of the command-line (but my personal preference is command-line all the way). Since my initial post, HP has responded to me and we're working on the issue.

 

Thanks for the bit about your experience regarding the HP switches, especially about unfixed security issues. Those are the kinds of experiences that have pushed me towards open source solutions whenever security is a requirement. I would very much like to trust a vendor's word regarding security, but with the possible exception of Cisco, my experiences won't allow me to do so.

 

I'll share what we go with and our experiences going forward. But progress is going to be slow. The bottleneck being my time.

 

Did you try going CLI?

 

 

What I really like about this switch. This one gets upgrades, upgrades and upgrades: https://h10145.www1.hp.com/downloads/SoftwareReleases.aspx?ProductNumber=JE006A&lang=&cc=&prodSeriesId=

 

But, I have that switch since it was released years ago and there are bugs.

 

Talking about HP or H3C, they throw in feature by feature, but they really don´t fix their bugs and security holes, although they are tested and confirmed by hp networking support team in GB. Of course, I´m not a big customer at all. But I really hate it when I´m either told to wait for the next release again and again, or that the next level hasn´t looked at the problem at all.

 

So, what would be the next step forward? So please give me an alternative to a V1910? Perhaps with some SFP+