HPE Ethernet Switches Reviews

Here at ECS, we provide business-critical technology solutions for Fortune 500 and mid-level companies. We are an HP Elite Partner that also uses HP solutions to optimize our own business efficiency. Recently, we replaced an outdated voice network with an end-to-end networking and telephony service from the HP and Microsoft Frontline Partnership. The results include lower costs, better internal collaboration and enhanced customer service.

Networking and telephony services are critical – our company’s highly mobile field sales team travels and needs to collaborate quickly and easily with customers as well as with colleagues at our headquarters. We were challenged by an 18-year-old voice and voicemail solution that had grown costly and difficult to maintain. The telephone system, discrete from our data network, was supported by analogue T-1 PRI voice circuits with high monthly voice network charges from a nationwide telecommunications provider.

We sought a more cost-effective IP telephony solution to replace the existing telecommunications system. We needed a proven solution to replace our legacy voice and voicemail system that would ensure our customer communication would continue without disruption. We also wanted to provide our employees with additional capabilities not present in our traditional phone system.

We aimed to convergeour legacy voice system onto our current, highly available HP data network; unify multiple voicemail systems into the company’s Microsoft® Exchange 2010 cluster; and eliminate use of costly third-party Web and audio conferencing tools. In searching for a new solution, we wanted full integration capability with Microsoft® Office; high resilience and performance; sufficient capacity to support IP telephony and other applications; and scalability to support growth.

We considered IP telephony solutions from Avaya, Cisco and others but found them expensive and lacking functionality. We chose HP and Microsoft Unified Communications and Collaboration with Microsoft® Lync™ Instant Messaging, Presence, Web Conferencing and Converged Voice.

Through their worldwide Frontline Partnership, HP and Microsoft have designed and engineered this solution to work seamlessly. We trust the HP/Microsoft Frontline Partnership to provide fully engineered and tested solutions, supported by two outstanding vendors.

The backbone of our end-to-end networking and telephony solution is HP Converged Infrastructure, which brings together server, HP Converged Storage and networking resources with holistic management tools.

We leveraged our existing HP infrastructure with modest additional investments in a third HP ProLiant DL380 Server, a minor upgrade to HP Networking 2910 PoE Switches, and HP 4120 IP phones. The environment runs on Microsoft Windows® 2008 and is virtualized with VMware® vSphere software in a DRS cluster on the ProLiant servers. HP StoreVirtual 4000 Storage provides robust storage with a three-node, scale-out iSCSi cluster; HP Data Protector Software with Veeam backup; an HP StoreEver MSL Tape Library; and HP UPS power protection. HP Intelligent Management Center (IMC) software provides end-to-end management. In addition to Lync, this infrastructure runs all our business applications including Microsoft Office, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server® and, soon, Microsoft SharePoint®, for approximately 30 workers.

The new communications system simplifies how everyone here works. Frequently on the road, instead of punching in long conference line data I hit “join now” on my smartphone application for fast connections to branded conferences.

At customer sites, I use my HP Spectre Notebook PC for Web Conferencing and Instant Messaging. The Frontline solution improves customer service and enhances internal collaboration—all at a cost of less than half the previous service. We expect to achieve Return on Investment (ROI) in less than two years.

We were able to add capacity to our existing HP Converged Infrastructure to accommodate the new Lync environment. This simple expansion of our virtual environment had the added benefit of providing for a highly- available telephony solution. We then could collapse our separate voice and data networks into single-provider network that provided us with a lower cost solution to meet our overall communications requirements. Our team is rarely in the office together during the day. The HP and Microsoft Unified Communications solution allows us to collaborate very effectively whether in the office, mobile or remote.

What is most valuable?

How has it helped my organization?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What about the implementation team?

What was our ROI?

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

What other advice do I have?

What is most valuable?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What about the implementation team?

What other advice do I have?

Our K-12 school has an extensive campus which hosts 250 faculty and 1500 students, with over 240 students living in boarding houses. Our senior students and faculty members each have a school-provided laptop, while also allowing BYOD access to the network in boarding houses, and throughout the campus for select users.

Our IT team faced numerous security challenges associated with allowing unmanaged devices onto the network. We needed a solution that could accurately and reliably prevent and report threats to the network, no matter who the user or what the device is. Despite implementing measures such as installing local antivirus software on the school-owned machines and intrusion prevention on the firewall, our team was still bogged down with hours of manually identifying and eliminating network threats such as botnets, spyware, and malware—issues that were also impacting student and faculty productivity.

When we approached HP with our challenges, HP delivered the Network Protector SDN Application to identify and block network threats and enable secure BYOD. HP Network Protector Security, running on the HP Virtual Application Networks SDN Controller, enables automated network posture assessment and real-time security across OpenFlow-enabled network devices such as switches.

One of the concerns with implementing an SDN solution is knowing where to start. We were able to implement an SDN solution quickly because of our investment in OpenFlow-enabled hardware. We were able to take advantage of the Network Protector SDN solution by downloading a free software upgrade for our existing switches to enable OpenFlow, eliminating the need for a costly rip-and-replace of our network infrastructure.

Network Protector leverages the Virtual Application Networks SDN Controller and OpenFlow to program the network infrastructure with security intelligence from the TippingPoint RepDV Labs database. This effectively turns the entire network infrastructure into security-enforcement devices, providing unprecedented threat protection and visibility.

We installed the solution during a school break, and saw instant results when students and faculty returned. Immediately, thousands of threats were automatically identified and blocked by HP Network Protector, and our IT team was able to proactively address network vulnerabilities.

HP Network Protector takes away a lot of the manual labor that we used to do; we now know exactly where the infections are and how many there are—we can detect threats and respond in a proactive manner. That saves us hours of work every week.

We use Network Protector to help us with challenges around sites like Facebook, which are a distraction during class. With the DNS Blacklist feature, we restrict access to websites like that, which encourages the staff and students to engage more with one another during class. It’s hard for us to measure the return on investment that we’ve had with HP Network Protector, but there’s no doubt that it gives us the power to help staff and students be more productive in the classroom; and at the end of the day, that’s what we’re all about.

What is most valuable?

How has it helped my organization?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What about the implementation team?

What was our ROI?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

What other advice do I have?

At DreamWorks Animation, we produce billions of pixels and thousands of assets for each of the ten movies in our production pipeline. Our studio is on a 24/7 production cycle and if performance suffers, it could have serious consequences for our business.

Our previous network was pushed past its limits, making it unpredictable. We were using Spanning Tree for network redundancy and were having issues that we couldn’t fix. This forced us to reboot the core of our network at least once a quarter. Some of our more complex scenes take multiple days to render. If we had an outage 71 hours into a 72-hour render, we didn’t just lose the time the network wasn’t available, we had to start from scratch.

After reviewing our options, we found that an HP Networking solution fulfilled our stability requirements while simplifying and speeding up our network. We are using HP 12518 Network Switches and HP 5800 and 5820 Switch Series from core to edge. The equipment was installed over several months one building floor at a time, and our IT staff successfully deployed the solution to our data center over one weekend. We also utilize HP Intelligent Resilient Framework (IRF) technology which offers us the capability to create and manage a virtual chassis across multiple active switches. And we turned Spanning Tree off and now use Link Aggregation Control Protocol for redundancy.

What surprised us the most, after installing the equipment, was that we didn’t receive any calls from our creative teams. They didn’t seem to notice that anything had happened. Everything worked at every layer which is the best scenario we could have hoped for. Since we put in our HP network, we’ve shaved off a millisecond of latency between our Glendale and Redwood City offices. That’s a very meaningful boost in speed for us when we’re submitting half a million jobs every night for rendering.

It’s been a couple of years since the install and we still haven’t had a significant outage. The HP gear has been the most stable we’ve ever seen in terms of software and patches. 

For some of the product families the pricing beats the comparable Cisco switch by a small margin. In other product families they beat the comparable Cisco switch by a huge margin.

There are some missing features on the HP Procurve gear that I loved using on the Cisco gear (e.g., the NO SWITCHPORT command) but I pretty much have all the features I would generally need in a closet switch and >90% of the features I would need in a distribution-layer switch. I might find the missing 10% as I dig deeper into the platform.

What is most valuable?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

What other advice do I have?