Network equipment

[Paul Lussier]

"Ben Scott" <dragonhawk at gmail.com> writes:

>   I'm currently looking strongly at HP ProCurve (2600 and 2800
> series).  Good rep.  Lifetime warranty with next-business-day advanced
> part replacement.

I looked at these a couple years back, and while they seem on paper to
be pretty good, I remember that the specs for HPs when you dug into
them didn't compare well with the Nortel or Cisco stuff.  Of course,
if your environment doesn't need heavy duty equipment, the HPs will
probably do quite well.  And you can't beat the warranty :)

>   Cisco and Nortel both have a good rep, but they're also hard to buy
> and rather expensive (fiendishly so for Cisco).

Nortel never seemed hard to buy for me.  If you need a good rep, let
me know, I've contact info somewhere for a guy I thought was great.
Nortell is usually half the price of Cisco, and if you play the
competing quote game setting vendor against vendor, you can get them
to come down some :)

>   A good friend of mine works for Enterasys (FKA Cabletron), and so
> I'm probably going to at least look at their stuff.  In the distant
> past I wasn't a big fan of their stuff from a technical standpoint,
> but they're done the acquisition game so many times my past experience
> is invalidated.

Yeah, but that shell game usually results in a loss of talent and the
product line suffers.

>   I'm interested in hearing the opinions of others.

Heh, you've come to the right place, we've got no shortage of those here ;)

-- 
Seeya,
Paul