“Customers no longer have to compromise among functionality, performance or Power over Ethernet because ProCurve is delivering all three at a price customers are used to paying for any one of those capabilities”, stated John McHugh, vice president and general manager, ProCurve Networking by HP. "Just as the ProCurve 4000 series in 1998 and the 5300 series in 2001 helped ProCurve become the industry's no. 2 networking vendor, we expect the 5400 and 3500 series will fuel our continued industry leadership.”

ProCurve also announced the ProCurve 4200 Switch family, the ProCurve 6200 switch, and a new media-flexible 10 Gigabit module for the ProCurve 8100 series.

Developed by ProCurve Labs for the 5400 and 3500 series, the ProVision ASIC brings new and advanced capabilities to customers, including:

• Wirespeed policy enforcement: The policy enforcement engine gives network administrators hardware-based granular control of access and traffic flow to protect, detect and respond against network threats without impacting network performance.
• Built-in ASIC resiliency: Engineered to continuously operate while withstanding error conditions and external attacks, such as denial of service attempts.
• Programmable network processor: Allows for wirespeed in-depth packet analysis and enables new hardware-based functionality to be ignited without costly upgrades to the hardware.

Based on the ProVision ASIC, the ProCurve 5400 and 3500 families both deliver wirespeed Gigabit and 10 Gigabit performance and come standard with integrated Gigabit PoE. Every versatile intelligent port combines the capabilities of the ProVision ASIC, the flexibility of 10/100/1000 performance and integrated PoE.

One of the customers involved during the development of the 3500 and 5400 switches has been CERN, one of the world's leading particle physics laboratories.

"CERN is continually evaluating innovative technologies, such as the new ProCurve 5400 series, to help facilitate our research and productivity”, stated David Foster, communications, systems and networking group leader at CERN, a premier nuclear physics research facility in Geneva. "Sometimes our technical specification is slightly ahead of the industry standard - therefore there is room for a vendor to invest in developing high-quality, high-spec, highly reliable products. We like working with vendors such as ProCurve Networking who are flexible enough to do this with us. We also like the idea of having more intelligence at the edge of the network, so the 5400 as part of the Adaptive EDGE Architecture is in line with our campus strategy.”

The 5400 chassis family comes in 6-slot and 12-slot versions and includes bundles of 48 and 96 Gigabit PoE ports. Additional modules provide media-flexible Gigabit and 10 Gigabit uplinks. The 3500 1U switch family comes in both 24- and 48-port configurations and with an optional 10 Gigabit uplink. Both families also feature redundant power and use ProCurve Manager for automatic control and better management and ProCurve Identity Driven Manager for secure, automated access control.

An alternative to edge stackables, the ProCurve 4200 family of switches blends the performance and flexibility of modular switches and the cost-effectiveness and port density of traditional stackable devices.

The ProCurve 6200 switch aggregates edge switches through its 24 media-flexible Gigabit ports and includes an expansion slot for an optional 4-port media-flexible 10 Gigabit module.