Re: Advice regarding Cisco/Juniper/HP

[Jeff Young <young () jsyoung net>]

OK, I'll throw in my $.02,

It really doesn't matter what any of us say, anecdotes from NANOG will not
stop your CEO/CFO or worse your CMO from directing you to use HP.
You have only two choices.  The first is to engage in "war of the PowerPoints"
during which you and the HP account team inform "the people who write the
checks."  As most account teams are pretty good at this type of warfare, and
as the war will eventually escalate into a "war of the Excel Spreadsheets" it's
a pretty difficult road.  

The second choice is a "war of the Lab Reports" in which you bring HP 
equipment into your lab and test it against the comparable Cisco/Juniper
equipment.  By choosing this road you get to learn all about HP and if it works
in your application, you're that much closer to deploying it safely.  If it won't
work, you have real data which, in most cases (but not all), trumps any war
of the PowerPoints your account team might start.  Sometimes you even find
that while the "deal" looks really good, in order to accomplish your application
you'll need twice as much of Brand X and therefore, the deal isn't quite so
appealing.  (By the way HP, Cisco and Juniper are pretty much 
interchangeable in this discussion).  What CEO's, CFO's and CMO's really
like to see are options.  Cost and test all three.

jy


On 17/06/2010, at 11:52 PM, James Smith wrote:

> 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?