[RndTbl] Small switch recommendation.

Adam Thompson athompso at athompso.net
Fri Jun 2 14:59:17 CDT 2017


On 2017-06-02 12:38, Theodore Baschak wrote:

> Based on the prices of new items that meet your needs, 
> I'd almost recommend buying a Cisco Catalyst 3560-48TS -- 48+ gigabit ports (48+SFPs). I picked up one for around $200 shipped for my birthday in late 2016. 
> I also picked up an HP Procurve 2910al-48 for around the same price, its also got 48 gigabit ports + some SFPs, SNMP, CLI, etc. 
> 
> The only drawback on the HP stuff is the spanning-tree on the Procurve is pretty funky when you enable it (its not enabled by default), I would recommend against mixing these with other vendors.

HP's spanning-tree implementation works perfectly fine.  What they fail
at is making it obvious which STP variant you're running, which is
(IIRC) 802.1w by default, *not* 802.1d.  Which then interoperates poorly
with 802.1d switches, since HP's implementation of 802.1w's
backward-compatibility mode employs different timers (again IIRC) than
most others.  This is not wrong, they're within the standard, but ...  

...yeah, ok, funky was a good word in the first place :-/ 

Beware the HP-branded gear that started out life as 3Com instead of HP;
it's awful.  Horrible.  Terrible.  My thesaurus is inadequate for this
task.  The lower-end Procurve switches are all most Procurve-lineage
devices, and while they certainly have quirks (VLAN handling would have
been my #1 pick) they're solid.  Better hardware than the Cisco, in my
experience (fewer port failures). 

-Adam
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