The Palo Alto, California-based company acquired the technology for the new series from Riverstone Networks Inc last year when the latter was moving out of enterprise to concentrate exclusively of the carrier market. ProCurve has until now offered only OEMed product from Foundry Networks Inc for the enterprise core, re-branding two switches from the latter’s BigIron portfolio as its 9300 and 9400 series.
Those devices fall into the category of traditional all-singing, all-dancing Layer-3 core switches however, whereas the InterConnect Fabric Switch 8100 family enables HP to deliver on it vision of the intelligent edge, and as such represents an alternative to the 9300 and 9400, acknowledged Jon Weatherall, ProCurve’s country manager for the UK and Ireland.
Indeed, one might speculate as to the longevity of the OEM relationship with Foundry now that ProCurve has an in-house alternative that fits in with its overall architectural philosophy, though clearly HP will argue that it needs to continue offering the 9300 and 9400 boxes for customers that don’t want to go down the smart-edge/dumb-but-muscular-core route.
The alternative to its own OEMed offering is, in any case, only one of the scenarios envisaged by HP for the two new boxes (the eight-port 8108 and 16-port 8116), and by no means the main one: that would be to have an in-house product to offer against Cisco and Extreme.
Another is as an upgrade for ProCurve customers who have been using the switch meshing capabilities of our 3400 or 5400 edge devices as a meshed core, enabling them to repurpose those boxes back out to the edge, Weatherall said.
The prices of the two devices are straightforward, since there are a not a lot of variations in configurations. The 8108 has a list price of 23,995 euros ($28,918) and the 8116, 33,495 euros ($40,358).
The boxes are launched at the same time as ProCurve updates its Identity Driven Manager to version 2.0, whose main innovations are the ability to integrate with corporate directories (LDAP compliant and Microsoft’s Active Directory) as well as leading Radius servers (Microsoft IAS, freeRADIUS on Red Hat Linux and Funk Steel-Belted RADIUS on Windows), as well as the possibility of assigning specific access control lists by individual port. That module, a plug-in to ProCurve Manager Plus, costs 3,969 euros ($4,783).
