HPE Ethernet Switches Reviews

5400r are the core switches. These are recently launched and they are the newer version of the old 5400 series of switches, and we use them extensively in most of our projects as core switches. They're very, very robust, and we know if there's any major problems on these kind of switches here.

They support different types of modules: fibre-optic and copper modules. They offer very good value for the price, and they come with some excellent XP support platforms on the background: the warranties, the care-packs, and all of that. People like these controllers compared to some of the competing products.

With the 5400R, it's a very competitive price, and the product is very stable. We've seen a lot of people buying these products. Frankly, we've not seen any migrations, but people are buying it because of the good price and stability. It has got the right features for the kind of markets we are targeting.

They should enable certain features on certain frequencies.

We had no issues with deployment.

There are more than 50 of such switches we have deployed, and we are hardly facing any problems with these switches. Again, they're very stable.

If a client wants to start with a lower number of modules, they can do that. And if they want to add more modules, they can do that as well and still use the same modules.

The 5400 is fairly simple, not very complex. But it needs proper training and certification otherwise. We've seen people deploying this product, some of the companies in Dubai, and they didn't do it the proper way.

It's the only connection point we use to connect to our network. We really rely on it for that because we don't use anything else.

We use it to connect to our HP BladeSystem, which enables us to communicate. We're not a very big company, so this is really important to us.

Although it connects to our BladeSystem, we still have problems with the overall integration with the switches, BladeSystem, and 3PAR. So it's important to us that that integration is improved so that our entire infrastructure of HP solutions works together.

We've used it for three-four years now.

We haven't had deployment issues.

We haven't had problems with instability.

We have around 40 VLANs and two sites that are about 10 kilometers apart. That's a lot of volume across a long distance, and the switches have no problem with it.

Even with Level-1 service, they're very helpful.

It was complex, but HP did it for us.

HP did everything for us.

We were looking at not only the network piece, but all parts of our infrastructure, including solutions from Dell, IBM, and EMC.

Make sure you plan everything, deciding you want to manage and how the system should work. You want to be able to do just one config and forget about it.

They meet my business requirements as I use an application that's hosted in the cloud, in our data center, and on our network. I can "zoom the surfaces."

We used to have an unstructured data center without proper networking diagnostics. The data mines flow from different locations without a proper networking design. HP's people redesigned our whole data center and networking architecture. It's been stable and we've been able to scale. All I need to do is ask for any number of servers and they immediately create VMs.

There are RAM limitations on the VMs and I can't install certain apps on HP VMs.

It was installed three years ago.

It's deployed just fine for us.

It's very stable. Any downtime we had was scheduled. The design was redundant with double false switches.

Actually, we scaled up. We increased the the number of modules to meet the requirements we got from our branches.

Support in Saudi Arabia is different than if you compare it with other countries. If I give them a mark out of 10, I can give them eight. Support by HPE has met our expectations.

Setup was complex, but they helped us out a lot.

All the ProVisions and Comware-based switches work very, very well. They work and are very dependable at a reasonable price. The lifetime warranty is also a very nice feature.

We don't have to worry about them, which means we can focus on more important things. They are dependable and the lifetime warranty is great. The price performance factor is very good.

Free and unlimited access to software for the switches would be very nice.

We've had no issues with deployment.

They have been very stable for us.

They've scaled well for us.

The lifetime warranty is actually what typically can make or break a deal. It figures heavily into determining return-on-investment. Not having to pay extra for the lifetime warrant is what make the deal, for us, on these switches.

Make use of the free manuals on the HP website. Just download them. They're actually quite good.

They're reliable -- very reliable, in fact -- and a have a good management interface. They're simple to use and quite easy to understand, and I like that they're not CLI. It's the proper GUI interface that makes them much easier to use rather than just having the CLI which makes some of them very difficult. Cisco, for example, is only CLI, but HP gives you a GUI. 

They're also very configurable and they're very good.

The main benefit is reliability. The switches don't go down and they tend to last for a long time. They just don't go down.

They also only rarely need rebooting. I can probably count on one hand the number of times we've had to reboot an HP switch.

They are very noisy, though, and the fans tend to get more and more noisy as they go along. The noise is actually a pain because sometimes where we've got multiple floors, we might put a switch on each floor rather than just put them in the comms room, and there the noise is an absolute pain. They are just very noisy.

That's why we like them, because they're stable. They're very reliable and they just last. The PO switches are also very good.

You can scale by adding fiber connections to the switches which makes it simpler to join switches together, but we haven't found the need for it because the switch is so configurable.

Yes, we have used competitors. We have used Dell, which is absolutely lousy. D-Link has some high-end switches, but they just don't come close.

They're not Cisco, and big companies want to see a name like Cisco. True, HP isn't Cisco, but that's a bit unfair. Having that said, we've got one very big company now with about 200 users who are getting rid of their Cisco switches and putting in HP's.

They're doing so because of HP's reliability and because they got fed up with paying Cisco prices to get their switches and to configure them when any network administrator can configure an HP switch. With Cisco, you need specialist knowledge and you don't really have to have specialist knowledge just for a switch.

The most valuable feature for us is just their reliability. We've never had any problems with them at all. They are quality products that are better than the competition. They were also very easy to configure.

It needs better monitoring and alerting for issues. We use HP Intel Management Center, which is good, but there are a few extra things they can improve.

We have been using them probably for about five years now.

We've had no issues with deployment.

It's been stable and we haven't had any downtime.

It's scaled for our needs.

We have not had to use any technical support. Our support comes from the company from which we bought the switches. They set them up for us and they provide very good technical support. We've used them for over ten years.

We previously used Cisco and were a 3COM user when HP bought them and converted them to switches. We switched because of performance issues, and now we have very, very good performance. We have no speed issues with the licensing network.

The initial setup was not overly complex. We've got two sites and we use them on both sites. So we've had no problems, but we only have 250 users.

The company we bought the switches from implemented them for us.

The price point is good when performance is taken into account compared to their competition.

We looked at HP first and didn't really consider anyone else.

Throughput is the most valuable feature for me, and penetration in the central data center. We use different modules and you can just configure on top of it. We have a fiber channel because my building is tethered with five, six floors. I need to get all this fiber to be connected to the switches. One switch solved the issue with high availability. The second connected all our server devices. We sliced it to our switch based on our requirement.

They need to improve the GUI interface for the switches, the access layer switch in particular, with complete details so we can track each and every port. This will make it easier to find the gaps in performance.

Also, on two or three occasions, heat distribution caused a problem because we penetrate this to a different floor and a fan got damaged, stopped, and emitted a lot of heat.

We've been using it for four years.

I've had no issues deploying it.

I haven't had any issues with instability.

The upgrades are all pretty easy. We do the frequent upgrades based on the release notes of HP and it's going well for us.

Technical support is very good from HP especially because they give a lifetime warranty for the hardware. It depends on the support of what you've taken, for example, if you've been highly response level of followers. Now in Saudi Arabia, you can say the after-sales support has improved a lot. It's not only HP switching part, to be frank, it's HP with servers and anytime we open a case we can order pretty quickly as consultants.

The initial setup was simple because initially I used to have a Cisco switches, which was four years ago, and an old model. Configuration and backups are easy. Backups we configure on the solar vents and they're very much pretty integrated with the solar vents.

We evaluated Cisco, but they were very expensive in terms of total cost of ownership.

You need to analyze and observe the performance.

From the low-end ProVisions up to the high-end Comware-based switches, their most valuable feature is that they actually work. Not all switches can do that, especially at a reasonable price. HP's switches offer price performance you can't find anywhere else.

These switches provide us with simplicity when we need. The ProVisions have fewer features and fewer functionality, but they're simpler. If we need, we can go with the Comware-based switches which have high-end features. So with these switches we can have both sides.

We had no issues with deployment.

They have been stable.

We've been able to scale with these switches.

Technical support is mostly good, but it's just like every other vendor. When you're at level 1 and you yourself are very knowledgable already, you just want to pass level 1. Level 2 is, normally, quite good, and level 1 is just a filter to take away all the stupid questions. If you're at level 3, you're probably in trouble because you have something that requires you to talk directly to the lab. So with the tiered structure for technical support, there are some inefficiencies. It would be an improvement to make technical support more efficient.

We evaluated Cisco and Juniper. They are considered high-end providers, but HP can more or less do it all. For small, medium, and enterprise businesses, HP has a very good product range.

Get some proper training.