HP2824 and HP4100gl

The HP 2824 was announced in October 2003. End of life was announced on August 1, 2009. HP's free lifetime warranty stopped with the end of service life in 2014.

HP's Procurve division followed a procedure of developing switch technology which was then packaged as a single rack unit switch and as a configurable chassis switch. The 2824 and 4100gl are such a pair. The 4104 lists 512 KB as buffer memory in its data sheet while the 2824 data sheet is silent. We'll take the number from 4104 and apply it to the 2824.

HP noticed customer interest in packet buffer memory about ten years ago. Before then, QoS features that classified packets were well described in the manuals but HP didn't have a lot to say about queue sizes. HP's interest in queue size is covered in the write-up of the HP 2920. The 2800 series switches divide packet memory into four seperate queues. These queues are silos, protected from each other with no borrowing permitted. This is good for QoS but not for line rate switch performance. HP provided a switch configuration called Pass-Through Mode that addresses line rate performance.