HP A5800

[aali]

If I review the HP Networking guidelines, HP Recommends A5820 and A5830 series switches for DC TOR.  How about A5800 Series.  I have a customer who is looking for not highly complex Data Center Swtiches TOR switches and the only reason I would prefer A5800 over A5830 due to the 10Gb port density.  The A5800 with a 4-port 10gb module can accommodate up to eight 10Gb ports compare to A5830 which can only support up to four 10Gb ports.

The A5800 is recommended for small data center core switches, but was wondering if it can also be used for DC TOR switches.

Thanks,

[Richard Litchfield]

The 5830-48 has 2 x buiilt-in and 2 x optional 10Gb ports; the 5830-96 has 10 x built-in 10Gb ports (2RU). That is more than the 5800-48(2 slot) which is also 2RU.

The guildelines for use cases are suggestions; using other devices (such as the 5800) is fine too and I have certainly seen the 5800 as a TOR device many times. Both the 5800 and 5830 switches are listed in the data centre grouping.

Don't forget that the "AF" stands for airflow, and switches with AF in the name support front-back/back-front cooling which is usually desirable in a datacentre with a hot-aisle/cold-aisle layout.

[showneek]

Hi,

Richard is right. All of the 5800/5820/5830/5900 series are primarily targeted to data center server access as TOR switches.

Just to complete... the other main difference between 5800 and 5830 switches is size of buffers. 5830 switches has deep packet buffers (1.2 GB for 48G version and 3.6 GB for 96G version) so these switches can handle large burst data center traffic or are ideal for iSCSI solutions. The 5800 series switches have something about 4, resp. 8 MB buffers.

Another thing is that not all 5800 series switches have redundant internal power supplies.

BR,

Jan