HP not really a competitor
Their chipsets are dodgy, esp in low-failure tolerant environments. Their software is incredibly craptastic. I've evaluated them and used them in an attempt to lower the cost of mid-size render farms (15000 nodes) to large render farms (45000 nodes) and found them to be made of fail at every level, access, distribution, and core. Boxes that literally burned up from utilization, to devices that had chronic software problems.
Foundry was better (when HP was reselling Foundry, just be because the card firmware tended to be newer and the software updates were more frequent.) However, when it came down to making crap go, we turned to Cisco. For a 15% premium, we either had no downtime, or downtime with very fast turnaround, something that could not be said for either of the above. This also goes for the Nexus line... We've tested them against the competing Foundry devices and Foundry fell on their face doing the same job.
Same deal on the SSL VPN. Juniper/NetScreen has a great product, but it couldn't implement the same applications with the same level of customization... so, out the door. We were given a shit-ton of HP gear that we threw away to _buy_ Cisco gear because the failure rate was so high. The Juniper devices.... Never used, the last guy was fired because he couldn't get SSL VPN going... I spent 2 weeks with Juniper guys on deck... Trying to get their latest greatest switches up and going (massive software/firmware failure) and trying to get my proof of concept going on their device that I put together with my personal ASA.
They left in ignominious failure. We now have 45 new Cisco ASAs, and 6 new Nexus' (Nexi?).
Cisco VSG and Cisco 1000V products show that Cisco is moving in to the VM arena... They may move slowly, but when they get it... they get it solid.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
