ProCurve Targets 'Growing Pains' With New Switches
On Tuesday, ProCurve unveiled the ProCurve 2910 Switch Series, a lineup of four switches designed to give smaller companies a scalable option to address the growing pains of a networking infrastructure. The 2910 series is an update to the ProCurve 2800 and 2900 Switch series.
Renee Meisenbach, ProCurve's networking solutions manager, said the 2910 series features four fully managed Layer 2 10/100/1000 Gigabit switches that include SFP slots for optional fibre uplink switches: one 24-port non-Power over Ethernet (PoE); one 48-port non-PoE; one 24-port with PoE+; and one 48-port with PoE+.
Along with the switches, ProCurve also unveiled three, 10 Gigabit modules, which fit directly into the 24-port 2910 switches, letting customers add more Gigabit uplinks as their networks expand and start to require more peripheral devices at the network edge. The modules are an SFP+ for fibre, a module for copper and an interconnect kit.
Meisenbach said the switches, which are aimed at companies with 100 seats and up, are versatile and can be used at the edge, in branch and regional offices and top of rack in data center deployments.
"We call it the Swiss army knife of switches," she said, adding that the 2910 series offers support for bandwidth-intensive applications such as video, VoIP and unified communications.
The PoE+ models, the ProCurve 2910al-24G-PoE+ and the ProCurve 2910al-48G-PoE+, offer a higher level of power for devices such as wireless access points, full-color VoIP phones and newer PTZ (pan/tilt/zoom) security cameras and the network edge. PoE+ can scale up to 30 watts per port, where standard PoE offers 15.4 watts per port, Meisenbach said. PoE+ is also fully backward-compatible with standard PoE.
The switches, Meisenbach said, tie into ProCurve's Adaptive Networks vision, allowing customers to adapt to changing needs of applications, users and their organizations. The 2910 line also offers smaller companies an upgrade path to 10 Gigabit Ethernet.
"You get these wire-speed Gigabit switches that can be deployed right now," said Deepak Patil, ProCurve's global technical product manager.
ProCurve, Palo Alto, Calif., said the new switching line should be available April 1. The non-PoE switches list for $2,609 for the 24-port and $4,569 for the 48-port. The PoE+ models are $3,549 for the 24-port and $6,599 for the 48-port. The two-port 10-Gigabit Ethernet CX4 al module for copper is $779; the two-port 10 GbE SFP+ al module is $2,099; and the 10 GbE al Interconnect Kit is $779.