HPE Ethernet Switches Reviews

They've had a commitment over the last five years to be amongst the most open out there. They are very easy to deploy and manage, and offer a lifetime warranty. Most other vendors who have tried this, have shied away from it. I think recently they have focused on building a highly programmable and open OS so you can create a very large ecosystem around it.

Building a bigger ecosystem around them, not just wired/wireless, but there's being able to bring other HP areas such as server and storage groups. At the moment, they operate as separate business areas, and they could clean that up a bit. Also, the technical support needs improvement,

They've been doing it for 15 years and have a very reliable product. The fact that they offer a lifetime warranty in some ways is a testament to the stability because if they were constantly failing and churning them out, it would be reflected in their financials.

Since the acquisition of 3COM they have data center equipment that can scale to the largest data centres out there. I think they were the first to offer 40GB and 100GB. This is some big iron stuff.

They've had their ups and downs. I think this is one area they can improve in. For a while, you used to get thrown into the queue with printers and all sorts of other stuff. So they've fixed that, and it's better, but still needs to be improved.

It's easy to get going. You can unbox it, plug it in and have it running quickly, but if you go into the advanced settings it can take longer.

They've got a good product, but there's still room for improvement. I would be insistent that they help you integrate it with the non-HP services you have through their professional services.

Its features are, in principle, quite standard and basic, so I cannot give you any extra information about these features. They integrate nicely with IMC, the management platform.

The benefit is to connect everybody in the office. You cannot imagine working nowadays without being connected to the network for computing, coding, and streaming. This is mandatory.

The main one would be to have more basic parameters available on the web interface. There are too many basic parameters that you have to change in the command line. This means you need to train your people regarding the command line, even when it means having to change quite basic parameters. For example, changing the parameter to give priority to voice over data traffic.

The stability is an issue. We have features that lose their configurations, like a port that was configured for VLAN 5 suddenly becomes configured for VLAN 2. It's really very annoying. People lose the connectivity, and nobody knows why, including HPE support specialists.

The OS features lose their configurations from time to time and we have periodic network freezes. Nobody understands why this happens. That's the problem, actually. There are nice features, but they are not very stable.

Scalability is nice. You can stack several of them, so no problem with scalability.

We use technical support a lot. When we bought these features in early 2015, they were quite new in the HPE offerings, and many re-sellers, consultants, and even HPE support staff didn't know very much about how they work and how to fine-tune and configure them.

We had major HPE-certified consultants on site. We even had HPE specialists connecting, and they couldn't manage to really improve the solution very quickly. Usually we are quite satisfied with HPE support. This is why we continue to buy servers from them and we just bought storage. However, the support was not as good for these specific features that were purchased by HPE, an external company.

We were using Nortel until two years ago. We moved to a new building, so we had to switch as there were no active network components available. We had been using Cisco before and we still use Cisco for the wireless infrastructure.

When selecting a vendor of ethernet switches, there are not so many alternatives on the market. We wanted to work with companies we are used to. We had to choose between Cisco and HPE. Because we've always been very happy with HPE and there was a brand new series of advanced features that integrated nicely with IMC, we selected the HPE product.

This solution is a brand new switch series with new firmware. I hope it will be more stable over time. It's a very good solution, but I would advise others to check that aspect carefully.

The valuable features are:

• Reliability and consistency of service
• Standard core functions you would expect from a network switch
• Demonstration of price against performance.

I don't know all the products and all the background, but the issue is the single pane of management. Things like a single window to manage all the devices and better integration make a product or a company competitive. I guess having a competitive edge on that would be good. There is a little bit of routing from the HPE ProCurve switches. All the integration is there and moving it forward to a kind of stable, developed product is still progressing. There are lots of bits to the HPE network picture, so I think that needs to come together more clearly.

I have only been there six months of the three years that we’ve had the solution. The feedback I received is that it has become more stable and it has developed as time has gone on.

It scales for the method we have implemented at the moment. We have a large campus, over 500 buildings, so it supports that. We are in the middle of a review, so we are deciding on how we take the network forward as a strategy and then we will go to procurement. It may or may not be HPE in the future.

My previous experience has always been good. I have had no direct experience recently, but my team gets the support they need. They are happy with that.

I wasn’t involved in the installation. It was already in place. We are just using it as a rolling refresh for existing hardware. In terms of upgrades, I would say it is relativity straightforward. Probably not as slick as some solutions but it's not as convoluted as others. There is room for improvement.

When choosing a vendor, reliability, performance, obsessively competitive price comes into it, but it is also about supply chains and availability of stock. I had buyers in the past where you can't get equipment when you need it. It is important to have a good support chain. The vendors that we use need to be knowledgeable in the products and work closely with HPE, so that is probably a very important part of that puzzle. HPE has always been strong, I would say, and have had a good reseller and third party support market. I think it is a strong solution.

The ProVisions are actually very simple to use and are a very good, solid switch. It doesn't have all the advanced features, but they're coming. Now, they also have a DHT server running on them.

It needs more routing and more VPN ports. These are included with the Comware-based switches, but not yet in the ProVisions.

We're using ProVision in the K15 v16, v17, and v18 software range.

We've deployed them with no issues.

They have been very stable for us.

We can scale them just fine.

Just do it.

The most valuable features are full command line support, VLANs, protocols for trunking, and the lifetime warranty. These switches are really good hardware with good stability.

It's given us a stable solution for our network.

Stacking of switches

We've deployed is without problems.

It's been stable.

We have about a hundred users.

I've used technical support only once. We needed support for a transceiver that was not supported, so technical support didn't help me. We chose another transceiver and everything worked as we expected.

Console port speed autodetect feature not work as we expected and create some problems with connecting to switch. I think that better option is set up one port speed and write it to manuals.

The two biggest benefits of these switches is the performance for the price and the quality of service we get from them. They're competitively prices, especially given their performance, and the service is flawless.

We're able to extend our capabilities because of the reliability of these switches. We don't need to worry about this part of our network because we know that we can depend on them working consistently.

We've been using it for four to five years.

It's quite stable after several years of use.

The scalability is very nice, especially with new products coming out. Enrollment onto our network works and there's no stability issues as we grow our workforce.

I'm the assigned tech guy within our company on these switches. We had a few hiccups at first that HP technical support helped us with, but we've been pleased since.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward since I was already familiar with the CLI.

It depends on which model, but it's not really more expensive than other solutions.

We didn't really evaluate other options.

Test the specific features you’re looking for with performance, and verify that you're get the best pricing.

These switches are great because they're very easy to set up and to implement as part of network infrastructures. Most importantly, it covers all the areas that we need.

We install these switches for most of our customers at their premises. The time it takes to implement them is so much less than other vendors' switches. This helps us work much more efficiently and customers are happy because because of the lower turnaround time to get their networks up and running.

The interoperability with LDAP could use some improvement.

These switches deploy usually without any issue.

They are incredibly stable. We're able to use them for very challenging projects.

They scale very easily.

Technical support provides us with quick answers whenever we use them.

The initial setup of these is very straightforward.

The most valuable feature for us is that it naturally works well with other HP products. Our headquarters uses HP products, and it only makes sense that we also do so in our office. Not only do we use HP switches, but we also use their APs and our entire wireless solution relies on HP products so that our infrastructure works together and has consistency.

I think that Cisco's switches are more stable, so HP's switches could really be improved more with stability. HP switches are also more expensive than 3COM switches, as we've spent close to two $2 million. It would be great if it were less expensive.

We purchased them in 2008, but haven't upgraded since.

It deploys with no issues.

We don't really have any issues with stability. If and when something goes wrong, we just restart them. Most of the problems we have are on the server side, which seems to be more sensitive for us.

We used 3COM and then moved to Cisco, which was more stable. And then we moved to HP.

We looked at Cisco again, but they're expensive yet have a good reputation.

HP switches are probably the best quality product for the price. That's the most important thing someone should look for when deciding which solution to use.