HP Networking Infrastructure in Cisco

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

However, research from the Networktest independent testing lab shows that HP equipment can be shared with Cisco equipment. According to the test results, which used HP 9505, 5406zl and 5800 switches and Cisco Catalyst 6509, Catalyst 4506, and Catalyst 3750-E, Networktest prepared a 60-page guide that provides configurations for sharing HP Networking switches and Cisco Catalyst.

Training a system administrator who is accustomed to servicing Cisco equipment using HP Networking system management tools will not take long. HP has specially prepared a detailed reference guide on the HP Networking and Cisco CLI Reference Guide for the rapid mastering of HP network equipment by specialists who previously worked only with Cisco equipment. This reference book compares similar commands of operating systems used in HP and Cisco switches (for those who prefer to read technical literature in Russian, there is a translation of this reference book).

How different are the commands used to control HP and Cisco switches? Michael Earls says that it's possible to use renaming to use familiar Cisco commands . There are other examples of publications where joint decisions are considered.
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There is another issue of using a multi-vendor network - 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 mapping, performance monitoring, and backup and restore configuration files .. (anyone who wants can check this by downloading an evaluation version of IMC that can be used for 60 days here ).