Cisco HP Juniper List Price Comparison

Below is a cost comparison by list price for HP, Cisco, and Juniper networking gear.  I wanted to use ALU as well but their website was so terrible finding products and product info that I was worried about getting eye cancer.  In fact it does not even look like ALU even has a branch router that supports 911 any more – all I found were a bunch of missing links.  I stuck with the other three because they are what I consider all in one solutions for networking – I can get branch routing, branch switching, data center routing, and data center switching from a single source.  I tried to match the vendor solutions as close as possible. I found some surprising results.  I used very basic requirements to make this easy to put together.

All list prices were downloaded from the vendor or channel website via a Google search.

After this comparison below I will call out the obvious elephant in the room that industry bloggers are extremely reluctant to discuss in that list price may mean nothing due to possible discounts.
.
.

The Branch and small campus edge router
HP’s MSR50 comes in well below Cisco’s 2900 and Juniper’s 4350.  On the face of things these systems all run BGP, OSPF, encryption, legacy TDM, and voice for 911.  They are also all upgradable to at least OC3 if needed.
.
.

Data Center and Large Campus Routers
 HP comes in, at list, so far below Cisco and HP that I’d almost think these are completely different products.  In the end all products support dual full rate OC12, 10GbE, four GbE ports, encryption, MPLS, and can have redundant modules installed.  Juniper surprised me here by coming in well above Cisco.  I’d also like to state that the documentation available on HP’s website for the 6604 was pretty awful.
.
.

The Campus Access Switch
All systems must stack.  All systems must support 802.1af.  This is, of course, in addition to the normal stuff like remote management, STP, etc.  All systems must support routing for those just in case scenarios  and all systems must support 10/100/1000 GbE.  Cisco surprises me here in coming in so high with his 3750 platform.  HP looks really attractive yet again – even with Major Discounts.
.
.

Data Center Switching
Here I used each vendor’s flagship product.  Whether or not they highly exceed my requirements is irrelevant to me.  Right now I see data center core switches flush with 10GbE.  40Gb is on the rise and I’ll probably have to adjust soon.  In any case, Cisco was not able to get up to 336 ports as it needed an M2 card for OTV.  Juniper had plenty of space left and HP needed a bigger chassis because they only had 32 port 10GbE cards (according to the documentation I could find).  The transceiver costs astounded me.  I’ve always known they were pretty damn expensive  but like many other shops, I buy as needed and so this cost never really smacked me in the face like this.  HP surprises by coming in way over cost with, my opinion, the worst chassis of the three.

The above pricing may be unfair – most data centers will never need so many uplinks.  The vendor’s price may change when you add in the TOR switches.   Juniper had to use 40GbE interfaces.  I did not include maintenance.  Still, was fun to put together.
.
.
.
Now I’d like to call out the elephant in the room.  These prices may not be what companies pay.  Check out the below links:

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/102512-cisco-csu-263711.html

http://www.bradreese.com/blog/8-1-2011.htm

.
These are just a few recent examples showing that each vendor does allows for a discount of their product and that that discount varies.  The discount would be based on whatever your companies business management negotiates with the vendor and channel partner.  Negotiations may involve things like vendor lock in, size of order, add-ons, and other things I can only guess.  Everyone is covered under NDA so what companies pay for network equipment cannot be spoken about – ie whether they get discounts or not and what those discounts are.  You have to wait until a story like the above hits the news and then you can start to make guesses whether you think you’re overpaying or not.

.

About these ads