Old Cisco VS New HP- Which would you choose?

[keithatwood]

I have a project I've been given the go ahead on and would like some advice.

The Project:

Multi tenant building that will rent space to approx 8-12 businesses.

Tenants will be anywhere from 1 to 20 users/PC's

There are 4 Floors

Each Floor has a wiring closet that terminates to the ports on that floor

Each floor has 2 runs back to the main panel in the basement

Tenants can choose to have their own ISP or purchase WAN connectivity from the Building Manager

Currently, these switch are to accommodate DATA and not VOICE Traffic.

I will need to segement each tenant off into their own VLAN, and subnet accordingly those who wish to have Building managed WAN access (for routing purposes). Those who use their own ISP can choose their own IP Network.

There will be no intervlan communication between tenants.

SO...Here's my question.

I've got the choice between (6) NEW HP 1910-24G switches OR (6) Refurb 2970G-24TS-E

Price is identical

Which would you pick for a project like this?

[Leo Laohoo]

You can choose a refurb 2970 because this model can't do inter-VLAN routing.

Currently, these switch are to accommodate DATA and not VOICE Traffic.

Do you want to do VOICE traffic?  The 2970 can support "voice VLAN" but it's not PoE.  The only thing missing is the PoE component.

Price is identical

Price maybe identical but what I'm interested to know is what is your budget.

[keithatwood]

The Budget is quite low, $450 per 24port gigabit switch...or about ~$3000 total

If I had a $15000 budget I wouln't have to ask the question

[Alexander Maroukian]

Hi Keith,

In the Cisco forums I believe you will hardly get recommendation about the HP switch also when in its (HP's documentation) management description of the 1910-24G says "limited command-line interface" while the people here are playing every day with IOS.

On the facts you shared I would go for the Cisco switch. I agree with the Leo's opinion.

Best regards,

Alex

[keithatwood]

Thanks very much for the feedback. I think I had my mind made up on the 2970's before I asked the question, but thought I would post in case someone knew of some 'great' reason that i should be using something like the 1910.

Thanks again,
Keith

[Leo Laohoo]

Hi Keith,

Please don't take this personally or in offense.

When doing an IT-related project, I always tell the people around this:  You have three options to do your IT project:  cheaply, correctly and quickly.  NOW CHOOSE TWO.

If I was asked to do a similar project like what you are doing, I'd consider the following option:

1.  Ask for a more realistic budget - You have voice and data.  This means that you need a Layer 3 device somewhere.  This means you either have to get a Layer 2 switch and couple it with a router OR you get a multi-layer switch that can handle routing.   Let's not get started on MPLS because I'll just make you cry.

2.  Put it down in writing that the solution, based on the budget, won't work as well - a 2970 has a gigabitethernet but it only limited to 24-ports.  What about the maintenance of the 2970?  What if you need more ports?  What if you need to do MPLS?

[keithatwood]

No Offence taken! I absolutely respect you viewpoint.

However, the price gap between a realistic budget and a low budget in this particular scenario is about 10k.

I did take some time to look at new Cisco equipment (3k per switch). Even Hp and netgear want 2k per switch.

I've used Cisco refurb in the past with great success (their equipment seems to last indefinitely). So, I felt that with the budget in mind, I would take a very small profit for myself and give the client a solid solution.

Ps: from my original post, there will be NO voice at this time. As for layer 3 routing, I can add a 3550 for about 500

Thoughts?

[Leo Laohoo]

When you are talking about "refurb" do you mean Cisco Refurbish?

I don't know.  If you want a layer 3 version of the 3550 you need to get the EMI version and not the SMI.

[hobbe]

Hi

My 2 cents worth.

First I would not do either of the products.

The 2970 is a dead product since 2006, that for me makes it a bad choise.

The HP is limited cli wich is a dealbraker for me.

You should be able to get down to the 450 USD$ pricerange with refurbished 2960s or something similar like the small buissnes suit or so.

One of the things I try to think of when I build/design networks is the timeframe, this network is supposed to sit there for X amount of years and someone is to take care of it during that time. or rather hopefully do very little with it during that time frame.

If you start bringing in the time factor in the equation then you will se that a End of life product is not a good choise.

I know that you have stated that VOIP is not an option right now, but I would say that if you are to do what you think of doing and you do not consider that in x ammount of years you will run into voip that is quite optimistic.

if you spend money on things that will not work with it then that money is down the drain.

I do not know why the budget is tight, but there are some nice arrangements that cisco can do to help out to buy equipment, regarding the financing and timeplans.

Good luck

HTH

[Alexander Maroukian]

Yeah I originaly thought about 2960s they are wonderful but I haven't seen it in this price range if Keith can get it definitely this would be better choice. They do have Gigabit on all and PoE on some of the models also better forwarding bandwitdh.

Best regards,

Alex

[keithatwood]

There is also the option to go with Linksys (Cisco small biz).

The SRW2024-k9-na offers up gig ports and is fully managed, just in my experience the Linksys stuff has a brutally slow web interface and the cli is pretty useless.

The 2960's new are 2k and refurb, not much less.

Note: if the customer wants to add voice switches at a later date, those can be a seperate purchase. These initial switches are for the purpose of pc to pc/server communication and to get to the router (theirs out our's).

I really appreciate all the input.

[hobbe]

The 2960 is depending on what version you are willing to spring for around 500 Usd$

But just to make shure I understand you correctly.

You do not care for VOIP but you absolutely need to have gig towards the end customer ?

You will not be purshasing Smartnet contracts and you will not care about upgrading your software.

Why are you setting up gig towards the end user ?

Since your budget is tight then I would loose the gig option and go with a refurbished 2960, something like WS-2960-24TT-L

Yes the ports towards the customer will not be more than 100 Mbit, but how many of your customers will be purchasing 100 Mbit+ links ? If you need gig links to one or two customers then its cheaper to setup a switch just for them or use one of the links towards your "core".

my guess would be none would buy gig Internet access.

In Sweden one of the most used switches for ISP end-user communication is the 3400.

Good luck

HTH

[keithatwood]

Some tenants may have up to 20 pc's in their suite that would connect through these switches back to a server located in their suite. I feel that if they have heavy network usage the 100Mbps will bea bottleneck for them.

Internet access is a seperate project. The router will have 100Mbps ports and the wan connection will be 50Mbps tops.

I just wouldnt want a tenant to be moving in, coming from an existing 1000Mbps network and complaining that the network here is too slow for them when connecting back to their server.

Really, the setup is quite basic, there is the need for vlans, gigabit and reliability. I also like Cisco because all vendors recognize them as the standard and will work across the board.

At this point, I feel that if the 2970's offer vlans,gig and will run for another 5-7 years, that's a valid solution. And probably not even require a reboot in that time...

For the reasons of limited cli and management I no long consider the Hp 1910 as an option.

As for why the budget is low....that's always complicated.

Put it this way, I quoted multi ssid wifi for this same project and 5k for Cisco aironet ap's and a WLAN controller was out of budget.