Joe O's questions

My office infrastructure is currently configured with HP Procurve switches. They are interconnected with 10Gbps fibre. All the SFP+ Ports are in use on all the switches.

I am looking at buying a new switch that has only SFP+ ports to use as our core switch and in which all our switches will plug in to. I've read that the SFP+ Protocol is standardized.

Does this mean I could buy a Cisco core switch and have the HP switches terminate into without any sort of issues? I have people tell me that trying to mix manufacturers in this sort of configuration is a bad idea and that things will probably not work properly.

I have a single instance running which is sitting behind their load balancer.

When I use apache's benchmark utility and point it at the instance the response time is more often than not, under 50ms. When I point ab at the load balancer the response time jumps up to 400ms+

I was wondering if anyone has encountered this and/or if there is a solution to get the response times lower?