HP has always been in the networking business, through its Procurve division.
However, their acquisition of the old 3Com/H3C products brought a broader range of products under the HP umbrella.
Since then, HP switches have grown more robust, more feature rich, more powerful, and infinitely more reliable.
The current culmination of that expansive growth is the HP 5406R zl2 Switch, which allows for wired and wireless switching for core and access layer solutions for both branch office and enterprise environments.
The HP 5406R zl2 was, IMO, created explicitly for the SMB space. It features a converged platform with built-in resiliency simplifies deployment, providing a minimum 30% improvement in SDN performance to enable business agility, and delivering a 43% lower cost than competition backed by no hidden-cost limited lifetime warranty.
Additionally, the 5406R zl2 also brings to the table
- Provides out-of-box simplicity requiring no software licenses
- Unifies wired & wireless policy via IMC single pane-of-glass
- Provides investment protection with future-proof SDN-capability & OpenFlow 1.3
- Improves application performance with low 2.1us latency & powerful 2 Tbps backplane
- Offers flexible connectivity on up to 288 ports with PoE+, 1/10 GbE, & 40 GbE-ready
- Eliminates up to 37% SmartNet surcharge1 with HP Limited Lifetime Warranty 2.0
- Removes hidden costs with no add-on software licenses – all features included
- Reduces CAPEX by up to 36% with 1 GbE, 10 GbE & PoE+ starter bundles
With those improvements, and the inclusion of HP IMC, which provides a single pane of glass management console and framework for managing this device, you can see why we had no second thoughts selecting the HP 5406R zl2 as the SmallBizWindows Networking Product of the Year 2015.
I have been in possession of the HP 5406R zl2 chassis which came with an HP 20-port Gig-T PoE+ with 2-port 10GbE SFP+ v2 Zl module and a 24-port HP Gig-T PoE v2 Zl module, two (2) HP 5400R zl2 management modules, and two (2) HP 5400R 2750W PoE zl2 power supplies.
HP’s excellent IMC management solution is, of course, standard. (I hope to snag IMC brain trust’s Les Stuart and Chris Young for a detailed tutorial on IMC one of these days.)
We hope to bring you a detailed review of this product in the April timeframe.
Our sincere thanks to HP, and to Sue Gillespie for taking the time to brief me on this product.
John Obeto is CEO of Blackfriars Capital
© 2002 – 2015, John Obeto for Blackground Media Unlimited
