I´ll bet a fiver
I´ll bet a fiver on HP.
The pretense of friendship is officially over between Hewlett-Packard and Cisco, though the two giants have been rallying their banners for war since the launch of Cisco's Unified Computing System last year. In a blog post late Thursday, Keith Goodwin -chief of Cisco worldwide partner organization - announced that his company …
We didn't move to Cisco when we rebuilt our data centres due to cost, complexity and lock-in.
Using HP for switches and L3 routing between VLANS and Juniper for security, WAN optimisation and core routing. Using a completely seperate FOSS management tool for both HP and Juniper, and all devices talk to each other wondefully. No integration mess - everything just worked.
Haven't looked back - open standards (Juniper and HP) FTW!
Agreed, by real open standards, the hp Matrix kit is pretty closed off in that it is all hp proprietary chassis and formats, but what I think hp are saying is that the Matrix (and hp blades in general) allow you to use switches from several different vendors (including, currently, CISCO), so there is still competition even if they are all hp badges parts. It also makes for easier integration - ever try mixing even just LAN switches from different vendors, especially in the 10Gb arena? With the UCS kit you get just the CISCO option.
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HP...Open? Juniper... Open?
really? from what I've seen all of these companies are quite closed and proprietary when they want and need to be.
you dont have to be 100% cisco with cisco...just ensure that you use open standard methods and dont drink too much of the special Cisco juice... their little special extensions etc or you ride the river down to lock-in.
we use Cisco with plenty of other manufacturers kit...and plenty of FOSS software too