H3C Switches

[Nerm]

Well I have been tasked with a project in China that has a requirement to use H3C brand switches at the distribution and access layers. I have a few "test" boxes but haven't booted them yet. They look and feel as cheap as their price tag indicates. Anyone have any experience with this brand they would like to share?

[icecream-guy]

wasn't the H3C brand in the news last year, regarding the China Spying issue?

[wintermute000]

They work, just syntax and documentation are janky as. HP used to sell them before they aligned the whole current stack under Aruba.

I wouldn't be snooty about it - used to be 3COM / Huawei joint venture, 3COM bought out Huawei, then got borged by HP, now more shenanigans that I haven't followed closely but I believe HP sold them off a few years back. Put it this way, this ain't your belkin or even mikrotik.

I've seen at least 1 large campus deployment (I actually did some of the grunt work for the deployment coz I was riding the bench at the time) in the last few years, like I said they basically worked, the only real issue we had was working out how to do voice VLANs and then how to wrap our heads around the routing syntax, basically all just wrestling with weird syntax. And other quality of life quirks like tab auto-completing to an entry, but actually there are still other possibilities LOL - took us a whole day before we realised 'why the f--k are the commands not there' lol

[Nerm]

wasn't the H3C brand in the news last year, regarding the China Spying issue?

Doesn't make me feel better. Wouldn't surprise me either.

[DanC]

They work, just syntax and documentation are janky as. HP used to sell them before they aligned the whole current stack under Aruba.

This.

We have some 5900's at work running Comware code (installed before my time)... in fairness, they've actually been really stable. The documentation is really shit and obviously the syntax is a weird if you're used to Cisco but all in all they're pretty powerful boxes. Also, SNMP polling can be a bit of a challenge too.