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Reviews (1)
May 29, 2016
HP ProCurves do their job flawlessly.
HP ProCurves do their job flawlessly. First intro to the HP enterprise line was in 2004-2005. Those are still running at an old job and I've heard no complaints. I was having network issues at work, so my boss said to split the VOIP phones away. I decided to just move them away from daisy-chained Dell Powerconnect 6248s and onto a single HP Procurve 5412zl. HP firmware is really available and they are proactive about fixing bugs. My two issues with the Dells (on 3.3.3 fw) is that my two Linux gateways would kernel panic on PAUSE frames.
Again I run some old, solid HP Proliant DL360 G5s, with onboard Broadcom NICS. Before then I used a Supermicro with Intel NICS and before that I used an old ZT computers server with Intel NICs. The problem PAUSE frames extended that far back, over numerous Linux installs with different kernels. My coworker and I were looking into the problem, and he was driving the troubleshooting and observing dmesg while the Proliant was unable to get on the network. I moved the ethernet cable over to an HP Procurve and the server came back online with no problems.
Both the Procurve and the Poweconnect use Broadcom's IC on the motherboard, but I trust HP a whole lot more with having better integrated firmware.
I can pretty much do anything on the phone LAN and nothing adverse happens. I even added loop protect and put some of the most import workstations on it. When and if the Powerconnect network croaks, I can tether the sales and support staff to their phones.