I have had most of my training on Cisco routers and looked there first. I found the 2900 series to be a great choice due to the small size and ease of Upgrade/expansion for future proofing.

However, the switches that I use are 3com switches all gig (which I would like to have on the router but not totally necessary)

Any suggestions and experience would be greatly appreciated.

-D

30 x HP Procurve 5304 & 5308 switches with WESM (wireless edge services module)
approx 220 x HP procurve 1RU switches, such as 2626, 2610, 2520, 2800, 2650, 3500 etc
approx 250-300 HP access points – 200 series
a few 4100′s and 5412′s

We find that the reliability of the setup to be incredibly good. we would probably have on average, 0-2 switches a year and 0-1 AP’s a year have faults. Considering that the environment the switches are in – hot, dusty, non-air conditioned cabinets, i think that the level of reliability is fantastic. Warranty is great, we’ve had no issues with replacements, even to rural towns.

I’d say that ‘RA’ has just had a particularly bad series of luck – with the amount of HP switches we manage, if they had a tendency to break on a regular basis i’m sure we would have seen it by now.

As for trunking etc, i’m not experienced with Cisco gear, but i’ve yet to see any features missing from the HP gear. The low end managed switches don’t have every feature available – such as layer 3 routing etc, but the higher end gear such as 5300, 5400, 3500 series can do just about anything you need. We’ve got a very fault tolerant setup at our central site with 3500 series switches setup with redundant, load balancing inter-switch links, as well as VRRP (Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol) which works fantastically. A switch can go down and no more than 1 ping is lost.

Luke

My setup is about 15 sites with between 3 and 6 switches per site. We found that the HP ProCurve products cost about half as much as equivalent Cisco products, and the HP support is a better deal in that it is included with the products and the ProCurve support people are based out of the United States and really know their stuff.

I have had a fan failure on a 5308xl, but the unit ran with the fault light on until the fan was replaced (free of charge) by HP. I have also had a ZL Gigabit Module fail in a 5406zl chassis, but we had an extra on hand and again it was replaced no problem. Really, these failure rates are right on par with our Cisco equipment though the most common problem on those is bad nvram or bad flash that won’t pass fsck.

That said, the only problem I have experienced with ProCurve is that it supports LACP, which does not work with legacy Cisco, which does not support LACP, where the HP does not support CDP. That said, our HP network with Premium Edge Services supports OSPF routing.

The commands are almost directly on par with Cisco though I find Cisco’s CLI a little bit more user friendly and complete. Either way HP has 90% and the same feature sets anyway. The biggest disadvantage is that most documentation spread around the Internet is for Cisco though it is generally still somewhat applicable to HP ProCurve.

That said, we have enabled SSH just like on our Cisco switches. We also use ProCure Manager, which is great for the management and firmware upgrades of a multitude of ProCurve switches. We had no problems setting up the ProCurve devices to authenticate against Microsoft IAS RADIUS for management. We have also done 802.1q trunking, and are currently working on 802.1x port authentication and VLAN tagging for different groups of users. The tests are all good demonstrating it should work fine with our current ProCurve equipment.

When I took over the position here, half of the switches (about 10) were all HP ProCurve POE managed switches… The other half were a mix all over the board from Cisco to Netgear to HP to 3Com…

The decision was made a few years later to do an upgrade. My first call to the equipment distributor asked for nothing but Cisco poducts. Their reply back was a suggestion to also look at other solutions. Since we have an entire Voip system running on HP right now, why not move to HP for the rest of it? I bit the bullet and bought several managed HP switches having never touched the current set of HP switches beyond a firmware update.

Like Jason said, the OS on the HP products is very very similar to Cisco’s IOS. So similar that even though I was trained and at home with Cisco, I was able to sit down and word-for-word type up a new config on the HP products with very little guess work.

Saying it took 20 minutes would be a long stretch since it probably took half that time, fully configured authentication, port security, custom VLANs, etc.. It was so straight-forward that I don’t see how it could take longer.

Now recently I decided I needed a new router to replace the far under-powered, overloaded and overwhelmed router we currently have. Once again I decided to check out HP and ended up picking up a medium-business solution. It came equipped with their “SROS” equivalent to IOS. Again it was nearly word-for-word exactly the same configuration as I would do on a Cisco, including all the shortcuts.

Had it running within the hour.

The entire system has now been up and running for over a year now, the POE switches for Voip have been running for over 3 years now. I have NEVER had to reset them or reconfigure them. I have never had any parts (fans, etc) fail on any of them.

I don’t know whether it’s luck of the draw that the 20 or so switches I have + a router are entirely stable, incredibly efficient, easy to configure devices… but I’m thinking HP is actually at the top of my list now. Cisco is great at what they do and I could probably give a very similar success story about some Cisco products I bought in the past, but it now seems to me that HP is just as good.