Tonight’s upgrade went about how we expected, not quite as quick as well as we hoped, but about what we expected. It took almost exactly 30 minutes.
In case you are wondering what we did (I’m sure you’re all glued to your seats) here’s a basic overview.
Gustavus’ network has one central routing switch which passes all the traffic between the different buildings and networks on campus. Up until a little over a year ago, that switch was a Cisco 4006 switch, but we were outgrowing it.
We replaced the Cisco with a HP Procurve 5308 switch, which gave us 14 copper gigabit ports and the ability to have far more fiber ports. It also had some really neat features like “virus throttling,” which blocks computers which seem to be displaying “virus like activity.”
This summer HP came out with the HP Procurve 5400 switch. The main advantages to the 5400 switch is that it can take even _more_ ports (each slot can take up to 24 gigabit fiber ports) and that it can do 10 gigabit ethernet. It will allow us to provide at least a gigabit of ethernet to every building on campus as we improve the college’s fiber optic plant, plus 10 gigabit ethernet to the servers when the need arrives. (And it will.) Plus, because the 5300 switch is still relatively new we were able to trade it in for a fairly significant percent of the cost of the new switch.
In the short term, people probably won’t notice that much of a difference other than a few more servers are directly attached to the core switch. In the long term, the new switch should allow us to grow.
Contact Us
Phone: 507-933-6111
Email: helpline@gustavus.edu
Web: https://gustavus.edu/gts
Blog: https://gts.blog.gustavus.edu
Remote Support: https://sos.gac.edu
System Status: https://gustavus.freshstatus.io
Hello from New York City. I live in a ten building apartment complex that is considering HP 5400 switches. Have you deployed it? Any problems?