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Which Switches?

 
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James Crosland_1
Occasional Advisor

Which Switches?

Hello hoping people can give me some advice on what switches we sould be looking at.

 

We have multiple smallish sites anything from 20 to 100 staff and we currently have a mixture of Procurve 2525 / 2610 etc.

 

We're looking at moving to VOIP and therefore switch replacements so I've been looking at options for switches.

 

On the edge I'm looking at

 

J9625A - Procurve 2620-24 POE+

J9299A - Procurve 2520-24G POE

J9146A - Procurve 2910-24G POE +

JG092A - Procurve 5120-24G POE

 

so one 100mb, and 3 1Gb options with varying L2/L3 capabilities

 

 

For the core (servers / firewalls etc) I'm looking at

J9145A - Procurve 2910-24G

JE074A - Procurve 5120-24G

 

I'm not looking at doing anything too clever with L3 routing, static routes between the Voice/Data/Mngt VLAN's should be enough to do the job.

 

Questions I'm looking at

 

Is it ok to mix families (for example 5120 at edge and 2910 are core) or is it better to stick with the same family across the network?

 

What are the benefits of 2910 family over 5120? If I'm happy with static routing is there other reasons to go for the 2910.

 

All comments/suggestions welcome

 

Cheers, James

 

 

5 REPLIES 5
James Crosland_1
Occasional Advisor

Re: Which Switches?

and as a quick addition,

 

If we decide to stick with 100mb to the desktop (2620) how does tat effect the choice in the core?

Richard Litchfield
Respected Contributor

Re: Which Switches?

The great thing about sticking to standards is you can mix and match any way you want! So no issues with having any or all of those switches working together. You may want to stick to the ProCurve (sometimes referred to as E-Series) switches - that would rule out the Comware (A Series) 5120 switch.

 

2520 edge + 2910 core would be the lowest cost gigabit solution.

2910 everywhere would be the fully-featured gigabit solution (10Gb options, L3, most features).

 

If the core is large enough, a 5406 chassis or stack of 3800 might be suitable too - they provide higher levels of resiliency and HA.

James Crosland_1
Occasional Advisor

Re: Which Switches?

Thanks for the reply, the one site we already deployed VOIP we went for 5406 in the core, but that site is much much bigger than anything else we've got.

 

Are we likely to have issues with Procurve / Comware in the same LAN?

Richard Litchfield
Respected Contributor
Solution

Re: Which Switches?

No issues - they operate together perfectly. The commands you type in are a little different; sometimes that bothers people, but you can use the built-in GUI or the management tool IMC. How often will you be making changes though?

James Crosland_1
Occasional Advisor

Re: Which Switches?

Are they a brand HP has recently bought and just not fully integrated with their OS yet then?

 

We're certainly more familiar with the procurve type iinterface but one or 2 commands shouldn't be too much a problem. I don't envisage making alot of changes, generally we will setup the LAN and then leave it to do its stuff.

 

I'll speak to our supplier and see what kind of pricing discounts I can get for the 2.  I don't think we need the L3 dynamic routing the 2910 offers so the question is can i justify the extra spend of having the same interface!