I've been reading and searching on here as much as I can to try to help me in making a decision, unfortunately when I think I know what to do, I read something else and get confused again.
We are in the process of moving networks within our datacenter and will have 2 drops coming into our half-cabinet. We have about 7 servers in there, some for our own use and some for clients. In all cases, we manage the servers and are the only ones with root access (no need for VLANs for the purpose of protecting IPs etc).
We currently have a single drop and use an HP procurve 2524 layer2 switch that has been in there for over 6 years and never had a single hiccup. We also don't push much traffic at all though. Under 5mbps combined.
My question though is this: moving to the new network we will have 2 drops that are set up as HSRP on their end (upstream of me, I don't have to worry about having two switches). In order to use the dual feeds, we will need a Layer3 switch. One feed will be active, the other is not, both are connected to the switch via a VLAN and provide a gateway for VLAN2 to use. I have never used a layer3 switch, though I'm not *too* concerned since I don't expect we'll be doing anything too complex. My understanding is that one VLAN (VLAN1) will be set up with an IP address assigned to each drop and that VLAN1 will create a gateway for VLAN2. The second VLAN (VLAN2) will be all our "inside" client IPs that will then route through VLAN1.
I was briefly checking out the cisco 3750, but I think it's overkill...? I don't want to spend too much money, since I don't think we need any complex setups, at the same time, I don't want to waste money by buying something that won't work efficiently down the road.
My immediate short-list is now an HP procurve 2610, an HP procurve 3500 J9470A (not the YL), and a Cisco 3560 24-TS.
Of course, then someone mentioned Juniper (whom I have zero experience with either) and hence the title to my thread... I'm thoroughly confused. I was looking at the EX3200-24T.
Ok, so if I have to boil this down to some simple requirements/thoughts... here goes:
1. I only need 24 ports for now.
2. I use SNMP currently to monitor usage for clients (and overall)
3. I like HPs and have used them for layer2, I like their lifetime warranty and software availability
4. I don't have direct experience with Cisco at all.
5. Aside from routing from one VLAN (provider side) to another VLAN (my side), I don't think I need any other special features (hence the hp 2610 being ok I think, since it offers "lite layer3")
6. Some people say HP is great for layer2 but not for layer3? Now I dont' know what to think.
7. Currently use about 2mbps and might jump to 3 or 4mbps, but don't have major needs. I'd like for this switch to be able to last me a while though... so maybe 20~40mbps+? (but still not the hundreds of mbps that others here push
8. If possible, I'd LIKE to limit some servers to 1mbps or 2mbps on a per-port basis... but this is not a hard requirement. (I think this takes the 2610 out).
Budget: I like the $500 price tag of the 2610, but can spend the $1500~$2000 for the HP 3500, Cisco 3560, or Juniper. I would just rather not, if the price/features are not justifiable.
Hopefully I've provided enough information for someone to offer their insight? I think a few strategic key points or questions from someone with more experience might be what I need to help me bust through the "too many choices" fog and end up with the best switch for my situation...
I've been looking at these two Firewalls for a quite some time and I am not sure which one I should go with. Price is not a factor since both are around the same price range.
The firewall is going to be in between my DROP and LAYER3 Switch.
So...FastE -> Firewall -> Layer3
As you can see, I dont want any fancy VLAN stuff or anything like that since my switch can take care of all that. I just want a firewall which is easy to configure and manage and has DDoS protection built-in.
If you have any other hardware based firewalls in the price range of ASA 5505 and Netscreen 5GT then I would want to hear about those as well.
I would like to buy a 24-port gigabit web managed switch, but I don't know which to choose.
The HP Procurve 1800-24 or Cisco SLM2024.
They have almost the same features but for example; the HP has (limited) lifetime warranty for example, and the Cisco supports IEEE 802.1D, Spanning Tree and Fastport.
Is the Cisco switch worth well over what the HP ProCurve costs? - The ProCurve has much less cache, but how much of a disadvantage is that for a switch?
to build a new 10GE network and have received offers from Juniper and Cisco distributors.
Juniper seems to be a bit more expensive. It was our first choice at the beginning untill we saw many big ISP's using cisco 6509 with SUP720-3BXL for routing.
Is there anyone with experience on both products? How about support for both of these?
I need to protect about 80 servers from certain attacks some of them are being victim of. Altogether, these servers use about 200Mbps being almost all of them webservers. The last time, one of them was a victim of a DDoS attack which made all the rest get some packet loss (because this attack was consuming all the bandwidth we had available).
I was looking at Juniper solutions, however I get a bit confused with all the products they have to offer. First, I was looking at IDP series, but they seem a bit pricey and I believe I donīt need all those IDP functions those devices are capable of. NetScreen is also too expensive for me. Iīm looking at a budget of 10.000$ aprox.
I found SRX series and after taking a look at SRX240 and SRX650 specs [url] those firewall numbers seem very nice and perfect for my problem. Would this be a wise choice? This device would act also as the main router for our racks. Please let me know if there are other recommendations that fit the specified budget (10K).
Can anyone give any real world numbers as to what each model of the Juniper-J series router is capable of? How much do these routers cost, and where is the best place to get them from?
Does anyone have any experience running Juniper SSG-550 firewalls in a high-traffic hosting environment?
I run network operations for a hosting provider in Australia. We currently have two J4350s running as border routers, and we are looking at putting two Juniper SSG-550s behind the border routers to do stateful firewalling / NAT.
We'll be using active/active NSRP on the SSGs for load balancing and failover.
My concern is that these devices may not be able to handle our traffic load. They have a hard-set limit of 256,000 "concurrent sessions" which may not be enough for us in peak times. Almost all of our traffic is HTTP though, so I would imagine sessions would timeout quite quickly?
In one of our racks, we now just have two Procurve (J4900B) switches, and run software firewalls on our CentOS servers. We are now looking towards a hardware firewall to ease managment and reduce load on our servers.
One of our suppliers reccomends the SSG140 from Juniper, and it seems to cover our needs. The SSG320 however seems to have more features, like layer3 routing. Could this device replace our Procurve switches, and act as a firewall/switch?
Anyone familiar with these devices and have some input on what to choose? How does the anti-ddos and bruteforce attack functions work out, do they hold up? Anyone tested the Deep Inpspection Signature module? Is it worth having for a ISP/Webhost?
with a mini-hp VLAN problem I'm having. I currently have a HP 2626 that a local client had lying around, but I'm having issues understanding the VLAN setup.
What he wants to do is to setup 12 servers off the HP 2626 and use the routing & VLAN support. I was wondering what options are used in the VLAN config to get this to work, as well as how to route additional IPs that may be used later on to VLANs. My cisco training tells me to use Trunk ports, but I don't think HP uses that terminology.
I am tried of not finding a good documentation on now to configure netscreen-25 firewall.
This is the current setup;
Ethernet Drop -> Netscreen (connected via straight RJ-45)
NetScreen -> Switch (Connected via cross-over cable)
This is the what I want to be able to do...
I am assigned a 76.36.57.32/27 subnet Netmask 255.255.255.224 Gateway 76.36.57.33
1) Make Netscreen accessible via IP 76.36.57.34 for remote management.
2) I dont want netscreen to assign IPs for my wired devices because I've already set all their IPs and those are the ones I want to use.
Now, I did read the manual [url] and went to Network -> Interfaces -> Ethernet 1 Trust *edit* and in the "IP address" box I typed 76.36.57.34 and netmask "/27".
In the "Manage IP" box, I typed 76.36.57.39/27 according to the manual.
After doing all that, I cant access any of my "wired" devices behind firewall and neither can I access the firewall itself with the IP I assigned.
we have this Juniper SSG5 firewall, our very first Juniper and wanted to use it.
While I am able to use it in NAT mode, I have been unsuccessful to use it in route mode.
We have Public IPs from the same segment and I wanted to use it with the firewall but it appears that I can't assign IPs for each port if the IP is from the same segment.
Does it mean that we can't use it other than in NAT mode?
What we want to accomplish is to have one of IPs to act as gateway and filter or route in/out traffic to/from our other IPs.
We are currently looking making some switch changes in our rack as we are expanding.
We don't push a whole lot of traffic (currently 15MBPS) but would like to think ahead for growth.
We are looking at using either the Procurve 1800-24G which will provide web managed 24 10/100/1000 ports or the Cisco Catalyst Express 520-24TT which provide web managed 22 10/100 & 2 10/100/1000 Ports.
Connected to these switch would be our servers and then uplink to our firewalls.
HP is cheaper and provides faster ports, but would Cisco provide additional value over the HP because it's Cisco and their experienced technology?
I have been really trying to learn all I can about layer-3 switches and have gotten good advice on my other post. I've never had to use them before, and in moving to a new datacenter network I'd like to take advantage of dual feeds that require a layer-3 switch.
I've been looking at switches that are across a broad spectrum of prices, between $500 and $2500 or so. I'm 95% decided on the HP procurve 2610 since we don't push a lot of traffic (under 5mbps) and I don't need anything too fancy. I considered a Cisco 3560 and 3750, as well as Juniper... but for this thread I'm really interested in hearing about any experiences with the hp 2610?
Essentially, two feeds from my DC will go into one VLAN, which will act as the gateway for a second VLAN, which has about 7 servers attached to it.
Since the layer-3 switch will be routing all traffic from one VLAN (7 servers) to the second VLAN (dual DC feeds), I'm curious to know if anyone has any experience with the hp 2610.
I don't need to give each server its own VLAN. Right now they are all under our own control, so they can all share the same VLAN. So one big VLAN for our servers routing to one tiny VLAN for the two uplinks is all I need.
Is there anyone configuring Procurve 2650 with Spanning Tree Protocol? I want to have redundant up links to different router ports, but whenever enable STP, it seems lead to loss packets too much
I am going to setup new clustering system with 2 Procurve 2650. One of public access and one for private connections (most for database access, control panel connections, backup files transfering). Aiming using around 35-38 servers. All servers using SM board with 2x gigabit NICs
Is there any trouble I can face to with that kind of network? Or any better solution with the same budget? or should I use gigabit switch for private connection?
I know a lot of people here on the boards have a good amount of experience with the HP switches. I am going to be ordering a 2810-24g this week and will need a 1000BaseSX sfp to throw in it. Are the HP's brand specific? IE do I absolutely need to purchase an HP sfp and not say, a foundry or cisco one? I need to figure out which one I will be ordering, hopefully one I can source locally quickly, so that I know if its connecting via lc or sc and make the call for the cross connect. I am in the bay area, maybe someone will know where I could pick one up too.
I am looking for a Procurve 2848 switch. It's listed on ebay with different prices (from 650 to 3000usd). I wonder what price I should consider as a fair price? Dont want to pay much, but dont want to buy broken unit at cheap price either. An used one is fine whenever it's still working at all ports
I have a SSG-320M I manage, and would like to know if I can block traffic to our web servers based on the user agent hitting us? I know user agents that keep using more and more IP addresses to crawl us, one already taking up some 30 or 40 addresses under my policies and its a pain to identify these by hand and keep updating the firewall every few days to add new IP addresses for them. Is there somewhere I can add part of the user agent I do not want to ever see again? Right now I do this by having a policy at the top saying "BadBotsGroup" is denied. But I want to deny anyone with a user agent "OneUserAgent" or "SecondUserAgent"
It seems so important and simple, but I do not see anything about being able to do this. Thanks for help and pointers. Right now we have special code at the top of our sites that blocks these bots, but I would much rather do it in one location at the firewall.
What type of cable/settings are needed to access the console port of a ProCurve 2626 J4900A? the recent one I ordered wasnt working with the regular way I access these switches.
I use a null modem (crossover) female-female serial console cable and connect it to my laptop serial port w/9600-8-1-None to access my ProCurve 2900 48G series.
But I tried using a straight/null/rollover(cisco's) and none of them worked. I also tried 9800-8-1-xoff/xon. All of them are giving me weird text when I press [ENTER] numerous times. I can access my 2900 series switches fine, no problem, just these 2626 ones I cant. My laptop can definitely detect the port cause when I disable it, I get a message on my terminal window which says "disconnected". So I am messing up somewhere.
By the way, I actually returned the switch when it came the first time because I thought they gave me a faulty one and I got another one, but it behaves the same way. But the actual switch functionality has no issues as I can assign my servers IPs and be able to access them remotely. I just cant configure the switch itself without the console port.
I'm having a tough time finding a discernible difference between the 2810 and the 2848, beyond the $1k price premium on the 2848. Can anybody speak to the benefits of the 2848 over the 2810?
The only main difference I see between 2848 (48 ports) and 2650 (48 ports) is the vast difference in thoroughput and switching capacity, 2848 (Throughput: Up to 69.8 mpps; Switching capacity: 96 Gbps) having a higher capacity and 2650 (Throughput: 10.1 million pps; Routing/switching capacity: 13.6 Gbps).
So now, if there is a public switch for http/ftp/ssh and private switch for backups and there are about 35 servers connected to each switch, does it make sense if I go with 2800 for the private switch and 2600 for the public?
The basis of my conclusion is that on a public port with limited bandwidth, a user cannot continuously push close to 100mbps for long before running out of bandwidth. But on a private switch where the user has unlimited bandwidth and can push 100mbps continuously for longer periods and some of the users on the private switch might also have 1gbps port access.
Looking to upgrade to a new switch and have the following in mind. Budget is around 1-2k. We're pushing 500mbps upstream so i want to make sure that the unit can handle that well. Lots of full speed traffic between servers too.
No fancy features required, and the only need is port trunking, which all of these have.
I look at the specs for latency and pps, but I'm not sure if you can trust these figures.
Anyone have experience with the following.
HP Procurve 2910al-24 $1430 latency <2.9us 131 Mpps 176 Gbps Bonus: 10Gb capability with expansion module
I've been tasked with buying a "good" edge switch for my company's datacenter presence. After a full day of searching around and reading, I think I have decided on a procurve. The question now is what is sufficient for our needs.
We currently have 8 machines and will possibly add another 3 or 4 before the end of the year. We're running gigabit everywhere at the moment, and at bare minimum would need gigabit to 3 of our servers currently. Hopefully we will need gigabit to 4 or 5 servers by the end of the year.
Our website is of very high value to us, but we're also very much in the startup mentality of pinching pennies.
My question is if a web managed switch like the procurve 1800-24g has some performance/reliability downsides compared to like a 2810-24g managed switch. Looks like the 1800-24g can be had for about $400, and the 2810-24g for about $1300.
Searching around this forum, I saw a few references to the 1800-24g where the comment was that it would be great for a lower throughput need. Can anyone tell me why this would be insufficient for higher demands?
Our peak sustained throughput on the uplink to the hosting provider's router so far has been about 120mbps, and we hope to double this by end of year (and grow beyond).
If possible, I would like to be forward looking to the point where we will want to spend more money and have redundant switches in place to protect uptime. I do see that the 2810-24g is listed as stackable, but reading /rnd/pdfs/ProCurve_Stacking_Technology.pdf on HP's website (newbie not allowed to link in posts) seems to me to say that I wouldn't have any options for automatic failover to a slave switch with it. Does anyone know if this is correct?
Having a failover hot switch ready is not a deal breaker since we're only looking at switches that will give us high confidence in the first place.
How about comments on the wisdom of buying something like this used? My gut instinct is that I should avoid used since this is a high performance single point of failure for our entire internet presence. But I don't know how rock solid I should expect a used procurve to be.
In case you are wondering, our technical needs from the switch our modest. I will probably set up a vlan for each of our load balancing clusters to contain multicasting, but the only other feature I know of so far that I desire is the snmp reporting data.
I guess the root question is - would a web managed procurve leave me at a disadvantage for row performance or reliability compared to a full managed procurve?
