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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: GBIC compatibility and pricing (was Managed, cheap, DC power switches)
> Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2008 15:15:45 -0700 > From: "Steve Dalberg" <[email protected]> > > This reason is twofold, one is Resellers were just buying whatever cheap > gbics they could and bundling them with Procurve switches (I'm sure this > happens to other vendors too). Thus most of the profitable parts of > switch sales were being eroded by the resellers. > > The other is that Procurve offers a lifetime warranty on most (possibly > all) of their products, including gbics I believe, thus the premium. I > believe you can just RMA a Procurve GBIC, and they will send you a new > one, no receipts, no worries, no expiration, no service contract. > > He shouldn't have to eat 300 gbics unless he bought non-Procurve ones to > begin with. HP should be able to exchange/reprogram them if they were > HP Gbics. The problem was that earlier code revs would accept 3rd party optics. Buying the optics from the manufacturer rather than from HP saved a lot of money and was a common practice. Then the code was upgraded to prohibit non-HP branded optics. This was a non-reversable upgrade and, for the folks who had bought their own optics, they had dead boxes and had to buy HP optics to get them back into service. Quite a few folks were a bit upset about this. While HP can make whatever claims they want as to why this was a benefit to the consumer, it was clear done to benefit the HP bottom line and the consumer was not taken into consideration. If you had HP optics, no exchange was needed. If you compare identical optics that are branded by the manufacturer vs. those branded Cisco or HP, you will notice a 'small' mark-up on the re-marked units. Maybe a few hundred percent. -- R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) E-mail: [email protected] Phone: +1 510 486-8634 Key fingerprint:059B 2DDF 031C 9BA3 14A4 EADA 927D EBB3 987B 3751 Attachment:
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