Advice regarding Cisco/Juniper/HP

[bifrost at minions.com (Tom)]

On Thu, 17 Jun 2010, James Smith wrote:
> So my questions to the NANOG community are: Would you recommend HP over
> Cisco or Juniper?

Pretty much never, unless you're talking about a rebadged Brocade product.
Every time I've seen HP networking gear in production, its usually before 
it gets replaced with something else. The last install I dealt with was 
having so many problems it had a constant %10 packetloss on a simple flat 
network.

> How is HP's functionality and performance compared to Cisco or Juniper?

Typically poor, but this varies widely with the series of HP gear.
The software updates available also vary widely in quality, and I have 
rarely gotten a good answer from HP support on anything.

> Does anyone have any HP networking experiences they can share, good or 
> bad?

To end on a positive note, HP does have a good warranty, is typically 
fairly low cost and provides free software updates.

-Tom