HPE ProCurve Review

It does what we want and it is reliable. We have installed hundreds, if not thousands, of these throughout many cities. The failure rate is around 0.001%.

It gives us consistency across every site.

I would like to see more technical troubleshooting information, better logs, and better timestamps. Certain broker switches, when they reboot, default back to 1990. You can only tell how long they have been active and have to figure out dates, by pretending it is 1990 and moving forward from there.

It has been very stable, except for the last couple years. We had more than one broker switch fail, which is rare.

For scalability, it's stackable. If we need more, we put them in, connect them, and add them to the stack.

I have used technical support. Most of the time, it was just for replacements. It was very rare that we get real technical assistance to configure what we have installed.

We were developing a new system for casinos and had to have the network to build upon. We already use HPE and Dell, but were not happy with them. We are not a Cisco house, so we got left with HPE because this is a from-scratch system for casinos.

When looking for a vendor, I look for reliability, price, and features that do what we want. It can be the best and cheapest thing that lasts forever, but we can't use it if it doesn’t have the right features. It has to do what we want.

I was involved in the initial install and have done it hundreds of times. It was straightforward.

We looked at HPE and Dell. At the time, Intersys started this, and Cisco was with it. But they weren't good choices, due to the rising and continuing licensing costs. We went with HPE because it did what we needed.

First, you really need to think about what you want, as opposed to "just because." Then, find a solution that fits the criteria you need to make people just hop on the bandwagon. For us, HPE is the right solution. We considered Brocade, but now that they are being acquired, we're not sure if they are reliable. HPE has been stable.