* HP suggests several configurations for its recently announced LAN switches
HP last week positioned its two most recently introduced switches as a tag-team for building high-speed LANs.
The switches are the ProCurve 3400cl and 6400cl series, announced separately at the end of last year. The 3400cl provides Gigabit Ethernet connections to desktops and servers while feeding those into 10 Gigabit Ethernet uplinks. The 6400cl has several 10 Gigabit ports, so it can be used as a backbone switch or aggregator.
All of the switches are now shipping. HP suggested several ways the switches could be used together:
* Distributed-building campus. In this scenario, you might have 6400cl switches distributed in the buildings around campus, aggregating connections from stacks of 3400cl switches in wiring closets. At some point, even the aggregating switches would run back to a core switch.
* Low-cost, small, high-availability backbone. Smaller installations could use a mesh of 6400cl switches – without a core switch. The 3400cl switches could be dual-homed into two of the switches in the mesh. This arrangement provides all sorts of redundancy, and the resultant benefits should one switch fail.
* Flexible stacking for high-density closets. This arrangement would work for organizations with a high number of users in one location. Here, users would either daisy-chain a stack of 3400cl switches or link all 3400cl switches in the stack to a 6400cl via 10 Gigabit Ethernet. In the former scenario, a 10 Gigabit link from the last 3400cl could still go to a backbone switch, while in the latter scenario the 6400cl could still have a couple of high-speed links available to go to a backbone.
