HP Networking in Cisco Infrastructure

For the IT departments of many companies, Cisco equipment has long become the corporate standard of their network infrastructure and, when choosing new products, they focus solely on the opportunities that this vendor can offer them. The main thing that prevents them from acquiring network equipment from other vendors is the risk of incompatibility and the need for system administrators to master new network management tools.

However, research by Networktest, an independent test lab, shows that HP hardware can be shared with Cisco hardware. Based on testing results using the HP 9505, 5406zl, and 5800 switches and the Cisco Catalyst 6509, Catalyst 4506, and Catalyst 3750-E switches, Networktest produced a 60-page manualLists configurations for sharing HP Networking and Cisco Catalyst switches.

Training a system administrator who is used to servicing Cisco equipment with HP Networking’s system management tools doesn’t take much time. HP has specially prepared the comprehensive HP Networking and Cisco CLI Reference Guide to quickly learn how to use HP networking equipment with people who previously only worked with Cisco hardware. This handbook compares similar operating system commands used in HP and Cisco switches (for those who prefer to read technical literature in Russian, there is a translation of this handbook).

How different are the commands used to manage the HP and Cisco switches? Michael Earls, says that it is possible to use renaming to use the usual Cisco commands . There are other examples of publications where joint solutions are considered .

There is another issue of using a multi-vendor network - is the ability to fully manage all network devices using a single management system. HP IMC (Intelligent Management Center) software can perform network hardware discovery, network map mapping, performance monitoring, and backing up and restoring configuration files .. (anyone can verify this by downloading a trial version of IMC that can be used for 60 days, here )