HP & 3Com - Perfect Together

HP & 3Com - Perfect Together

History:

3Com has been in the network business for decades while HP (and the many acquired companies under it's umbrella) has been in the computing business for decades. Huawei, a Chinese manufacturer, had invested in 3Com and regulators recently shot down an attempt to gain a more significant portion. Not long after, HP had purchased 3Com, with promising results from regulators.

Combined:

The Register wrote a summary of the recent moves by HP.

HP has announced a new HP Networking brand, under it which it will offer an edge-to-core set of sub-brands: the A Series; E Series; V Series; and S Series products. The ProCurve and 3Com brands will go away.

...

The ProCurve brand will be transitioned into the E Series. The 3Com brand will be transitioned into the A Series, except in China where the H3C brand has done very well and will be retained. There will be a single converged channel programme using the best-of-breed features of the existing 3Com and HP channel programs

...

Donatelli said the A Series is for large enterprises, the E series for mid-sized customers, and the V series for small and medium enterprises. The S Series is for customers with network security needs, and the TippingPoint intrusion-prevention products will be featured there.

Network Management Implications:

For those of you who have been unfortunate enough to have to deal with Huawei, 3Com, and H3C devices, you will remember that the comman line interfaces are close enough to be helpful but different enough to cause nasty automation problems.

Some devices can have page size adjusted when displaying infomation, some have the option to shut off paging, some devices can not even shut off the pager - making it very difficult to script multiple device automations. Sometimes, sleeps need to be placed in the scripts, to make sure device automations actually work!

Plan on a nightmare of new issues related to automations on these devices, as updates are released. Some hope HP will fix some of the old issues on old hardware, but other do not hold out much hope, considering fixing old software would not drive new hardware sales.