We have several. Mainly, I'm looking to replace a 6509. It has about 250 10/100 ports in it, and it's simply overkill for our shop of about 100 devices. Looking at annual maintenance, it's expensive. Looking at a gig blade, I decided to think about something else. Especially since I'm anything but an IOS guru. I can fake my way through it, and generally find what I need, but that's about it. I'm thinking that a browser interface is more suited to our needs (read abilities).
When I add up that maintenance is free, Software upgrades are free, and the cost to purchase is about 1/4 that of Cisco, and maintenance becomes something that we can easily do in-house, I just don't see any reason to stay with Cisco gear. I'm wondering if I'm missing something, or if I'm correct here. From the sound of it, everyone with Procurve is happy with it.
I'm specifically thinking of a 4108 or possibly a 5372.
We use the 4108 for 10/100 clusters over 48 Nodes and under 128. They are definitely a lot cheaper than using Cisco and Extreme Networks for that matter.
We also found that Extreme Networks switches have troubles handling large broadcasts unless you hardcode the machines mac addresses to the corresponding switch ports. Apparently their processor isn't fast enough to handle it dynamically. Now we came across this problem because we were booting a 24 node cluster off of the master node using a broadcast. This is not a situation you will probably find yourself with in an office environment.
-- Mark Lane, CET mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Hard Data Ltd. http://www.harddata.com T: 01-780-456-9771 F: 01-780-456-9772 11060 - 166 Avenue Edmonton, AB, Canada, T5X 1Y3 --> Ask me about our Excellent 1U Systems! <--
