ProCurve has grabbed market share over the last couple of years, particularly in the EMA region, where it is already in the mid-teens, and there is a tendency to see it primarily as a challenger to Cisco. This latest slew of announcements, however, is far more targeted at 3Com and, in the case of the 1800 smart switch, vendors such as Netgear and D-Link.

The smart switch is a market that has grown up over the last few years and is still an emerging space, such that analyst firms still don’t split it out for dedicated rankings. It is essentially a category of product which offers a degree of management on Layer-2 switches which, while far short of fully managed, is a step up from unmanaged and, as such, represents an upsell opportunity for the vendors.

For this reason, smart switches tend to be priced closer to their unmanaged brethren, and the way that a degree of manageability it delivered is through the Web, though some vendors like D-Link have been adding some basic SNMP management capabilities too.

SNMP-lite

HP ProCurve, which hasn’t been in this space until now, joins the latter group with the 1800, said Nick Hancock, technical consultant for the company in the UK. It has SNMP-lite management for discovery of the device into a management framework, which we’ve included so that it can be sold into enterprise too, he said.

Indeed, while smart switches are primarily targeted at SMB, this inclusion of a degree of SNMP capability at least for discovery suggests that vendors are seeing some traction with these boxes in larger organizations, perhaps more for the branch office.

In common with the two other products unveiled yesterday, the 1800 is a pure Layer-2 device, which is interesting in that some vendors position smart switches as L2+ or L3 lite, in that they have some L3 functionality. Indeed, as silicon, particularly from companies such as Marvell, gets more muscular in its software capabilities, D-Link and others are adding L3 protocols like Spanning Tree and Rapid Spanning Tree which, as recently as a year ago, would have seemed a bridge too far for a smart switch, moving it closer to a fully managed L3 box.

That said, Hancock pointed out that the 1800 series has features such as link aggregation support and port mirroring that are normally found only in more fully managed L2 switches. The 1800 is in fact a family of devices, the high end of which is a stackable 24-port box (the 1800-24G) and a standalone 8-port (1800-8G), both of which offer copper and GbE connectivity.

2810 and 2510

As for the other two devices announced, they are additions to existing families and, in both cases, they come with an economy approach. The 2810 switch is for GbE aggregation for the enterprise edge, while the 2510 is a 10/100 device with built-in GbE uplinks, rather than the separately charged pluggable modules of the other members of that family, i.e. the 2524 and the 2512.

The 2510 (which despite its name ships with 24 ports because ProCurve is altering its naming convention), is also ProCurve’s first foray into fanless switching, in which the device is engineered to emit so little heat that a fan can be omitted.

The benefits of this move are twofold. For HP, it makes it less onerous to support the lifetime warranty it extends on all but its most high-end switches (the 8100 core box it developed from technology acquired from Riverstone and the 9300 core device OEMed from Foundry), as well as the 700 wireless controller OEMed from Symbol.

For the customer, the absence of a fan makes for a quieter device, which is of particular value in a small office environment, Hancock argued.

The 2810, meanwhile, is an addition to the 2800 family of GbE aggregation switches, whose other members are the 2824 and 2848. Where they have what Hancock called L3 lite features such as support for static routing, the 2810 is L2-focused, without L3 functionality, he went on. Again indicative of the change in naming, there are two versions, with 24 and 48 ports respectively.

Pricing

The common theme with all three devices announced is their economy proposition, be it in terms of the built-in GbE uplink and fanless operation of the 2510, the L2-only approach of the 2810 or the Web-managed nature of the 1800. In terms of pricing, the 2810-24G lists at $2,199 in the US and 1,659 euros in Europe. The 2810-48G meanwhile has a list price of $3,949 US, 3,099 euros Europe.

The 1800-8G lists at $209 in the States and 159 euros in Europe, while its 24-port big brother, the 1800-24G, is at $519 US, 389 euros for Europe. Both the 2810 and 1800 ranges go on general availability on September 1.

Meanwhile on September 15 the 2510-24 becomes available, with a list price of $419 in the US and 339 euros in Europe.