Tag Archive - HP

HP’s A12500 – Data Center Powerhouse

September 24, 2010 in Tech Field Day with 0 Comments

If you read my post on the Tech Field Day visit to HP you know I was disappointed with the technical content and ended up being a bit too harsh on HP for that. Although I did not get what I wanted I did like the direction they are going in. The good news is HP after that provided us with some addition PDF that have more of the info we were looking for. So I decided to look into the switch myself and I have to say if your looking for a new large data center core switch you need to at least look at these switches.

HP – 3Com – H3C ?

I think most people are not that familiar with how high end HP’s switching line is. Many people thought HP bought 3Com for low end switch but the opposite is true. H3C was a wholly owned subsidiary of 3Com but was founded as a Huawei and 3Com joint venture. H3C had a very high end line of switches that HP is now calling the HP A-series outside of China. It was formally called the H3C S12500. They have a number of offerings but the main ones we saw is the A12500. It comes in two flavors the A12518 which is an 18 slot chassis and A12508 is the 8 slot version.

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This is the A12518 and as you can see it is a full rack. However unlike the Nexus 7018 it does not need a special rack for airflow. It also has some fairly advanced power and fan control for optimal power consumption to lower the total cost of ownership. A prime example of this is the power per 10Gb port. The A12518 its 54w and the Nexus 7018 is 112w. So it’s half the power per port as the Nexus. BTU’s are half of what the Nexus is which is major savings on cooling costs. Over the course of a year that is a real savings in your data center.

Switching Capacity

As you would expect from a modern data center switch this guy is fully redundant for key parts. The mid-plane is a CLOS architecture and today provides 360Gb per slot (and that is standard marketing math, counts both in and out.) It will support up to 720Gb with future fabrics. It has a total of 6.6Tb per second today and the architecture can double to 13.3Tb down the road. It can have 128 non-blocking 10Gb ports and 512 if your ok with 4:1 oversubscription. The buffers are pretty good too at 256Mb per non-blocking port vs ingress: 92 Mb / egress: 80 Mb on the Nexus. It also is ready for 40Gb/100Gb but I don’t have the specs on that.

Another key feature of this line is the Intelligent Resilient Framework. This sounds very familiar to Junipers virtual chassis. I have read up it some more but can not speak to it with the proper knowledge so this section is going to limited. These technologies (VSS, IRF, stacking, virtual chassis, etc) provide a great benefit in eliminating spanning tree and doubling the links bandwidth. However if you do some searching you will run into some horror stories on failures with these technologies. I would be very cautious with this if I was deploying it. I have deployed a number stackwise, VSS and VBS rings in our data centers because I have not had many issues and the increased bandwidth with the elimination of spanning tree is well worth it for me. For you, proceed with caution.

What Next?

HP has come a long with in the data center switch market with the acquisition of 3Com and has a good vision for what data centers should look like. After really looking into this line of I switches I feel if your looking at large data center projects you need to at least talk to HP about these. After all if your going to consider Cisco for your servers with UCS I think it is fair to look at HP for your networking.

Tech Field Day – HP

September 20, 2010 in Tech Field Day with 1 Comment

The first vendor we visited was HP. First up was Jay Mellman and this was the marketing presentation which was well done. Jay talked about what the 3Com acquisition did for HP by brining in the high end switching from the H3C portfolio. Going into this I did not realize just how high end the HP switch line had grown. The 12518 is a big data center switch that directly completes with the Nexus 7018.

HP

Jay (pictured) also talked about where HP sees the data center in 2010. Their vision is a standards based DC focusing on service delivery. I agree with this vision as companies are going to be more concerned with are the key business services up and running not what it is running on. HP feels, as do I, that infrastructure will be converging into a single fabric. They also think they are in the unique position as they can be a one stop shop for all of your needs because they offer servers, storage and the network.

This led us to the next presentation and where things went downhill. We went to very nice looking showpiece room and this is where we thought we would start to get technical. We did not. In fact it was very non-technical. The presenter could not even answer basic questions like “What is the bandwidth per slot?” when talking about the 12518. His answer was “The good news is they sent the good looking guy” to explain why he is non-techncal. Yeah, that went over well. This was pretty much a waste of time. I had really hoped to get a good understanding of HP’s Intelligent Resilient Framework but we did so now it just sounds like a good idea but I still don’t know technical details.

After that we talked about the management software called Intelligent Management Center which sounded like a really nice management offering but price is going to eliminate most customers from buying it.

We wrapped up the visit with a discussion on Tipping Point which is a nice security product but again the presenter was more marketing then technical so not much to say here. When did the demo it was good but not a lot of depth. Looks to be a good product but security is not my strong point.

Summary

HP did not get the audience. Jay’s opening presentation is about all the marketing we wanted. We are a highly technical group but they sent no one technical. I like where HP is going on their products but have no idea if they are accomplishing their goals. Hopefully in the company weeks I can find the technical info I was looking for. However HP is clearly moving in the right direction and if your going to look at Cisco for servers you have to look at HP for networking in your data center.