Cisco ejects HP from privileged partner camp

I agree, Steve

Cisco is way more dominant in networking than HP is (or ever has been) in servers.

HP I'm sure is terrified of losing Cisco branded products entirely, such as used in their C-class blade chassis. Procurve may be a decent competitor, but when you have a Cisco shop I assure you that the network monkeys do not want any Procurve coming in, not supporting the Cisco proprietary bits. And it's sure that any network outage will find its way to being caused by the HP gear.

Cisco servers are laughable. They're more poorly engineered than Sun's AMD models and that's saying something. Have a decent admin look over HP, Dell, IBM, Sun and Cisco and they should rank roughly in that order. I think that Cisco is just so dominant in networking that they've begun to branch out because they have nothing else to do and want to see how much their can ram down their tremendous installed base. Even if only a small percentage ante up, there's a huge market forged by their networking.

what is the difference between a layer 3 switch and a Router ?

I think the next wave of It Innovation on Enterprise is going to come from HP . With its new range of Blades , (Matrix) , 3Com Buy , Such a nice procurve range . Quickly they should buy a Voice vendor (Broadsoft) and Video (Polycom) . Cisco will sooner than later will become a laughing stock - with no innovation to take them to the tech lead. Most of Cisco products are me too kind , most of their R & D wasted in trying to integrate , re-label their bought over companies . Common HP .. that is the way to go . Who cares about Cisco .. those poor IT Admins who spend their hard earned money on certification kits .. Guys open up .. the Game is changing . Look at Cisco's higher end enterprise Kits .. how old are catalyst frames ? Anyways , what is the difference between a layer 3 switch and a Router ? Isn't the reason 3Com never went to build a router ?

Oh Dear FAIL?

We've just bought a bunch of Cisco 9222i's as well as having a pretty large Cisco/HP estate. Let's hope this means HP can come up with a better switch than a GBe2. As long as it doesn't flap like it's going out of fashion (our 3120x's are up and down liek they are on a trampoline...) Then i'd be happy....

Competitors sitting in on Briefing(s)

Back in the 80's a group of us from GUIDE were invited to a briefing from IBM on Storage futures.

My company was a pinch penny so I had to pay for the car rental (GUIDE was in San Francisco the next week). Right before the briefing was to start IBM informed us that since one of their competitors was there they would not give us the briefing that was planned. So we spent the rest of the day and the next day not talking about anything that wasn't generally available to the public.

I felt cheated as I had paid for the car out of my own pocket and I had to give a trip report that contained essentially nothing (other than what happened at GUIDE). At the next GUIDE I complained to the group manager about the loss of information. I suggested that the OEM type's not be allowed at IBM briefings in the future. I guess he took that to heart as the next GUIDE no OEM's were allowed to chair committees. That was great but a little late for me.

I can definitely see IBM's point of view but it hurt my credibility at the company. We were never asked back.