I recently decided to move a client away from my beloved Juniper EX series switches because of quality issues.  A networking buddy suggested Aruba so I dug in and found a lot of half-information or just misinformation.  Below are the facts I was able to determine as of March 2019:

  1. Aruba HPE CompanyHewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) bought Aruba in 2015 and recently decided to kill their own “HPE FlexNetwork” switch lines.  HPE is rebranding any remaining HPE networking gear as under the Aruba banner.
    1. This means Aruba will live on and HPE will die which is super odd.  I have to think that HPE will spin Aruba off or sell it to Dell or Cisco in the coming years as part of the continued collapse of the Hewlett Packard empire.
  2. The Aruba 2930F Series of gigabit switches is an all-in-one, typical corporate switch where as the Aruba 2930M Series of gigabit switches come with no included add-ons like uplink ports.
  3. The Aruba 2930M is more expensive than the 2930F’s even though it includes less, because it can be easily expanded making more of a low end enterprise switch.
    1. For example the 2930M can be expanded with 40GB uplink card while the 2930F already has those slots filled with 10GB slots that are not optional
  4. The Aruba 2930M is faster, has more PoE electricity, can be connected to 10 other 2930’s

We spent some additional time to figure our the more meaningful specs of Aruba and Juniper switches then assembled that information into a simple grid you can find here: Comparison of Aruba 2930F, 2930M 3810 & Juniper EX3200 EX3300 EX3400 Series Switches


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