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My bread has been buttered and career has been built on the back of Cisco. Since the early age of 16 when I was working on the Cisco 1600 series routers, and Cisco 3000 series 48 port stack-able switches I have identified myself with Cisco and Microsoft. Recently I was faced with having to completely re-architect the network for a medium company that is rapidly becoming a large company.

I’ve done similar things before so designing it was not a challenge…keeping it within their budget needs on the other hand…

The configuration was pretty straight forward. Total of about 1000 nodes spanned across two facilities. We were building the one facility as a DR site so we had already drafted that design and the needs to meet that design. At the corporate office we were upgrading bandwidth and in doing so required equipment upgrades (as it so commonly does). My proposal called for the elimination of aging stack able switches to a more modern chassis. We were going to segment the departments in different VLANs, implement 802.1q in conjunction with VOIP phones and POE. My immediate thought of course is the tested, tried, and true Cisco 6500 chassis. To be unbiased though I looked at the Foundry, er, Brocade FastIron SuperX.

Both had one slight problem. The hardware to meet the requirements of my design cost over 100,000 dollars. If that wasn’t bad enough you have to pay yearly support contracts that will cost you another 10k. A chassis is not something somebody replaces every 5 years. Most people treat networking equipment like the Ronco Rotisserie, you’ve seen the infomercial “Set it and forget it.” That’s OK though, because networking equipment doesn’t typically break. When it does break its probably pretty significant and you will be more focused on getting it up RIGHT NOW rather than waiting for tech support to dispatch somebody.

So a colleague suggested we look at Procurve. He had experience with the Procurve line so I figured I would give it a try. I pulled a Procurve 2900 he had in storage out just to play with the CLI. Aside from a few different commands, it felt just like a Cisco. I had never programmed a Procurve and working with just my knowledge of IOS I setup the switch in a mere twenty minutes. I was impressed with the performance of the switch as well, it showed no signs of hurting when I gave it a torture test. What made it even better was the price! Mind you I needed a little more than the 2900, but the price for just this switch was about $2,500.00. Not bad for a completely manageable 48 port, 10/1000 switch, with 4 Gbic ports and LIFETIME WARRANTY. Yes you did hear my right, lifetime warranty. As long as you own the product, HP will provide next business day replacement. Knowing this I started to look at the 3500 series L3 switches, and the 5400 series chassis. I put everything through my torture test and tried to plan for every possible scenario. The Cisco does have some more features available to it, like how it handles port trunking, but all-in-all those features don’t out weigh your ROI on warranty when performance is about just as good.

All in list price for my design with Procurve was in the $45k range…that’s a far cry from 150k+ support contract from Cisco.

In conclusion: If you are looking for a much more cost effective alternative to Cisco, I would suggest you look at Procurve. You really can’t beat it for the price and warranty…its just too good to pass up. If you want 4hr response time you can pay an additional fee to have that option, but if you’re lost most IT departments you have spare parts on hand or a crash kit so you don’t need 4hr response time…unless of course its like your SAN or something…