I was a network engineer at a Cisco shop for 10 years. I recently made the move to cloud administration and I can't tell you how much I don't miss all the nonsense the Cisco has started pulling in the last decade.
Not to mention more e-waste since more frequent replacement just be stay in compliance. So good for Cisco, but bad for the customer and also for the environment.
Cisco switches used to be the industry gold standard because you could get 10 years out of the product before any major issues. Since the move to a subscription based revenue model in 2017, they have started forcing more and more of the business to become a recurring annual income stream while still upcharging for the Cisco brand name.
Yup, that was the beginning of the end a few years isn't a long enough life cycle when some of there higher end switches I've worked with cost 10 and 15k out the gate.
I hadn't looked into it but there has been some devices over the last few years where we replaced new hardware sooner than existing hardware with enough frequency that we keep having to double check ourselves if we run accross something in a client environment and worry it might be something we overlooked, and more often than not it's just an older switch that's had a 6-10 year service life that Cisco keeps supporting while ceasing support on newer hardware even within the same family
I bought my first Mikrotik router early 2011. Having replaced the caps last year and retiring it to "network support" functions (DHCP/DNS). It still receives updates from Mikrotik (I think v7 is the last major update though, I'll see if it's still there in another 10 years). Was looking through the CBS lines for a 10G switch last week, might shelf that plan if the updates are that short - what's stopping them releasing a slightly changed new line up, EOS/EOLing this line up and bricking the hardware with their last software update (like a few phone manufacturers do....) 😶
Sadly I suspect the sales and marketing team made this decision and not the engineers. Who know maybe I'm wrong. Unfortunately that cannot be proven unless a engineer were to come out and say this and unfortunately I don't see that happing.
Isn't Unifi more of a SOHO/retail brand rather than an enterprise networking brand? I don't know if TP-link, Zyxel or Netgear have proper EoL/EoS policies for all their switches either. Chances are, if there isn't a stated policy, they might just stop supporting it when they feel like it anyway.
@@Schonke That is a fair point although i would argue that only their APs carry the "enterprise" naming scheme. But to that end, if you view them as a SMB player, which they absolutely are, then yes they dont really need any EoL/S documentation. Defintely not enterprise when we lump them with other competitors in the firewall/switch space.
@user-zm7qz5fq2d LOL, no it's not. As some one who works with dozens of Cisco enterprise wireless LAN controllers & thousands Cisco WAP's, UniFi has a fraction of the functionality and features we use or need compared to Cisco. We could not replace our WLC's with UniFi. UniFi layer 3 switches are a joke and barely functional for L3 compared to Cisco Catalyst switches.
@user-zm7qz5fq2d remind me when you get the full support that is found in 10-15 year old cisco switches... you cant even get all basic debug information in ubi nevermind advanced debug info or HW accel
This is a bonus though for the secondary market where i e seen switches that are under 10 years old show up for pennies on the dollar. I've recently purchased 48 port gig poe+ switches with 4x 10 gig uplinks and redundant power supplies for under $100 each.
Ya those Enterprise grade gear are great BUT watch out for licensing. Great hardware only if the license still work. Some manage to hack it to bypass the license check but not always easy to do.
thanks to recycling laws your lucky when that happenes least in the UK its getting a lot harder to get such equipment and over at BT at least we no longer resell out working gear due to potential data security issues soo yea...
I had a perfectly fine edge device that I could suddenly not buy licenses for. And yes there was plenty of warning but the hardware was fine. So I ditched it for something that better met my needs from an eol/licensing perspective. I prefer to replace when the hardware demands it rather than the the company won't sell a license.
For routers, I can understand, but switches? What the biggest problem they could have? VLAN hopping? Can't we have, even if it uses more watts, solid hardware and software?
I can't speak for how long or short is to much for an EOL I know I wish the security company did that for the security panels and NVR/DVR they installed. Some sites would have panels we can't even buy any more they are so old and we are still trying to support them when things go wrong with them. We would drag a handful of old panels from other sites and plug and pray at some of these sites when troubleshooting them.
20+ years with Cisco and yes I explain my customers Cisco is like Oracle some years ago: lawyers led development. No innovations, still tons of bugs in IOS and worst: always more licensing. They did good job in lobbying Chinese competitors out of the market but they are super late to the multigig. The killing move was the basic features they removed from the Essential firmwares (stacking or routing). Told on customer that to refresh to same exact same speeds and feature that will cost them $1.5M more on 6y term. Cisco advertise hardware price reduction but drastically increased licensing costs.
It’s really irresponsible for these companies who claim to be “going green”. They could go much more green by not forcing people to replace perfectly functional hardware. It’s a huge waste that’s not really reported.
You can never win with a software based platform as they can always force customers to upgrade by simply “updating” the software with a known critical vulnerability that gets disclosed after a certain “end-of-life” point that forces customers to upgrade or be vulnerable to being hacked. They can make the software updates weaker as well as stronger so they are in complete control of forcing you to upgrade at their will. This especially applies to all the software based cell phones. A highly profitable business is not created on building robust last forever devices unless they can force some kind of ongoing subscription model.
Their new policy is completely ridiculous and unacceptable. There needs to be laws for all companies to support their products with at least 10 years of security related firmware and software updates. To have support periods this short is horrendous for the environment! Sickening.
"Compliance Law" needs to change. It should mandate that only products with 8+ years of security support from the purchase date will meet the requirement.
in my country, corporations who have CISCO switches, they will set them up once and do not climb there anymore, why climb there, and so some have been working for 10 years
When your first major switching platform, the Catalyst 5000, had devices in the field with years up time, decades later, you might start pushing people off, via EOL. That said if you work with your VAR you can usually get pretty substantial trade-in credit. It's that level of engineering why Cisco is still the number one provider of enterprise and data center gear. Many have tried to dislodge them and outside of niche use cases, all have failed.
ciscos not the one who gets hit for turning products into E waste after 2 years instead of 10 the company that brught the product does so they have to pay to have it 'recycled' and so forth the cycle continues
In an organization where we used to have 6506 and 6509 paying yearly M&S eventually costs more than just replacing them with the new whatever. sure it was a very long project but eventually we have swapped everything for 9300s and 9500s, the TCO made a lot of sense for this. not saying that 1 year for enterprise gear makes any sense, it does not, this stuff is hella expensive. but it prevents companies from keeping 20 year old gear in production. which is not necessarily a bad thing.
THe problem I have is the discrepency between TAC, HW and SW support. You get switches that get 5 year EOL but only a year or 2 of security updates so you're basically forced to replace them anyways.
yea but what did you actually get for swapping? ciscos been pushing a load of shitty 1G switches in 20 feckin 23 remind us why i can go buy a 10 year old cisco/other switch which is 10/40/100G for fractions of the price which are far more performant but hey lets just keep limiting smaller companies and individuals to 1G then try to force 2.5G when 40G is EOL in datacenters
@samcan9997 specifically for us, it made sense since the older gear was more power-hungry, noisy, and required a lot of space. Switcing to 9300s allowed for higher speed uplinks, better on all counts, and over 5 years, we reached ROI compared to 6509s. I absolutely agree that there are cheaper non-cisco stuff with better numbers, but sometimes it's not a choice you can make. Some companies adhere to the standard enterprise network stack and will never consider alternatives.
Providing much shorter support for infrastructure products which are viewed as much more critical to protect today than in 2014 seems like a great way to invite policymakers to regulate support requirements through law instead...
That’s not gonna happen for a long, long time. It took a tremendous amount of effort to get the attention of lawmakers for right-to-repair. Fastest option is for companies to complain to their Cisco reps and stop recommending Cisco products to their clients.
I wish that was true, but here are a few Cisco Switch CVE's just for this year: CVE-2023-20024 CVE-2023-20156 CVE-2023-20157 CVE-2023-20158 CVE-2023-20159 CVE-2023-20160 CVE-2023-20161 CVE-2023-20162 CVE-2023-20189
There doesn't seem to be much value in Cisco products outside of the largest 10% of companies and institutions that can just throw endless money towards it
Yet the Cisco Nexus 5548UP with an EOL in 2018 and last day of SW support in 2022 is still getting software releases as of 02-Aug-2023 [Version 7.3(14)N1(1)] ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS right, so the intent of my post was just to be careful of absolutes when talking about a Cisco. There are many BU who work on their own schedules and timelines. You may find that their "Small Business" line has different timelines than their bigger DC equipment. From the comments though, it seems your video has given people the impression that "Cisco isn't what it used to be" which is slightly misleading.
This only considers the time after EOL. Wouldn't you need to review and compare the median "Release Date" to "EOL announcement" duration to understand the overall picture of support? Supporting after EOS may be shorter, but product life could be longer?
@@technicalthug That would give an overall average for their product lines but misses the point of the video as you don't know when it will happen to the product you purchase which is the point. If I purchase $20,000 worth of switches and they announce end of sale the next day that gives me less that 2 years to replace $20,000 of equipment.
im doing my CCNA thru my Uni at the moment and its a joke. so many things are wrong in it. almost tempted just not do it, it that bad. they used to have good hardware, now its just overpriced crap. and dont even get me started on packet tracer.
If you (people/companies) in the USA or other 1st World country are not happy with this, what to think of us in a 3rd World country? Where each $1 compares to $5-10 in the US? We need these devices, but can not afford them..
Yeah Cisco is terrible their stuff is out of date looking it's old school them ripping off customers as crap they're support it sucks only 4 years that's garbage even 5 years is garbage 10 years should be a standard
I was a network engineer at a Cisco shop for 10 years. I recently made the move to cloud administration and I can't tell you how much I don't miss all the nonsense the Cisco has started pulling in the last decade.
yeah half cooked product sand a hellish nightmare of license scheme
Not to mention more e-waste since more frequent replacement just be stay in compliance. So good for Cisco, but bad for the customer and also for the environment.
Cisco switches used to be the industry gold standard because you could get 10 years out of the product before any major issues. Since the move to a subscription based revenue model in 2017, they have started forcing more and more of the business to become a recurring annual income stream while still upcharging for the Cisco brand name.
Yup, that was the beginning of the end a few years isn't a long enough life cycle when some of there higher end switches I've worked with cost 10 and 15k out the gate.
...unfortunately every big company is going this way :(
I hadn't looked into it but there has been some devices over the last few years where we replaced new hardware sooner than existing hardware with enough frequency that we keep having to double check ourselves if we run accross something in a client environment and worry it might be something we overlooked, and more often than not it's just an older switch that's had a 6-10 year service life that Cisco keeps supporting while ceasing support on newer hardware even within the same family
I bought my first Mikrotik router early 2011. Having replaced the caps last year and retiring it to "network support" functions (DHCP/DNS). It still receives updates from Mikrotik (I think v7 is the last major update though, I'll see if it's still there in another 10 years).
Was looking through the CBS lines for a 10G switch last week, might shelf that plan if the updates are that short - what's stopping them releasing a slightly changed new line up, EOS/EOLing this line up and bricking the hardware with their last software update (like a few phone manufacturers do....) 😶
I am just a home network user and use the SMB line. I don't have the cash to keep replacing switches.
Sadly I suspect the sales and marketing team made this decision and not the engineers. Who know maybe I'm wrong. Unfortunately that cannot be proven unless a engineer were to come out and say this and unfortunately I don't see that happing.
Unifi is one that just doesnt have an EoL or EoS documentation on any of their mainline products. Not sure why.
Isn't Unifi more of a SOHO/retail brand rather than an enterprise networking brand? I don't know if TP-link, Zyxel or Netgear have proper EoL/EoS policies for all their switches either.
Chances are, if there isn't a stated policy, they might just stop supporting it when they feel like it anyway.
@@Schonke That is a fair point although i would argue that only their APs carry the "enterprise" naming scheme. But to that end, if you view them as a SMB player, which they absolutely are, then yes they dont really need any EoL/S documentation. Defintely not enterprise when we lump them with other competitors in the firewall/switch space.
And sometimes their EOL is extremely long (UAP-AC-LR for example, thing is still going lol)
Or extremely short
@user-zm7qz5fq2d LOL, no it's not. As some one who works with dozens of Cisco enterprise wireless LAN controllers & thousands Cisco WAP's, UniFi has a fraction of the functionality and features we use or need compared to Cisco. We could not replace our WLC's with UniFi. UniFi layer 3 switches are a joke and barely functional for L3 compared to Cisco Catalyst switches.
@user-zm7qz5fq2d remind me when you get the full support that is found in 10-15 year old cisco switches... you cant even get all basic debug information in ubi nevermind advanced debug info or HW accel
This is a bonus though for the secondary market where i e seen switches that are under 10 years old show up for pennies on the dollar. I've recently purchased 48 port gig poe+ switches with 4x 10 gig uplinks and redundant power supplies for under $100 each.
Ya those Enterprise grade gear are great BUT watch out for licensing. Great hardware only if the license still work. Some manage to hack it to bypass the license check but not always easy to do.
thanks to recycling laws your lucky when that happenes least in the UK its getting a lot harder to get such equipment and over at BT at least we no longer resell out working gear due to potential data security issues soo yea...
From what you've shown, Cisco used to be the gold standard... and isn't now.
It has NOT been for at least 7-10 years!
I had a perfectly fine edge device that I could suddenly not buy licenses for. And yes there was plenty of warning but the hardware was fine. So I ditched it for something that better met my needs from an eol/licensing perspective. I prefer to replace when the hardware demands it rather than the the company won't sell a license.
And we all love the mandatory purchase of a DNA License
For routers, I can understand, but switches? What the biggest problem they could have? VLAN hopping? Can't we have, even if it uses more watts, solid hardware and software?
"Compliance" is the magic word here that says you must throw out well working Equipment because it's now EOL
I can't speak for how long or short is to much for an EOL I know I wish the security company did that for the security panels and NVR/DVR they installed. Some sites would have panels we can't even buy any more they are so old and we are still trying to support them when things go wrong with them. We would drag a handful of old panels from other sites and plug and pray at some of these sites when troubleshooting them.
20+ years with Cisco and yes I explain my customers Cisco is like Oracle some years ago: lawyers led development. No innovations, still tons of bugs in IOS and worst: always more licensing. They did good job in lobbying Chinese competitors out of the market but they are super late to the multigig. The killing move was the basic features they removed from the Essential firmwares (stacking or routing). Told on customer that to refresh to same exact same speeds and feature that will cost them $1.5M more on 6y term. Cisco advertise hardware price reduction but drastically increased licensing costs.
It’s really irresponsible for these companies who claim to be “going green”. They could go much more green by not forcing people to replace perfectly functional hardware. It’s a huge waste that’s not really reported.
You can never win with a software based platform as they can always force customers to upgrade by simply “updating” the software with a known critical vulnerability that gets disclosed after a certain “end-of-life” point that forces customers to upgrade or be vulnerable to being hacked. They can make the software updates weaker as well as stronger so they are in complete control of forcing you to upgrade at their will. This especially applies to all the software based cell phones. A highly profitable business is not created on building robust last forever devices unless they can force some kind of ongoing subscription model.
Their new policy is completely ridiculous and unacceptable.
There needs to be laws for all companies to support their products with at least 10 years of security related firmware and software updates.
To have support periods this short is horrendous for the environment! Sickening.
"Compliance Law" needs to change. It should mandate that only products with 8+ years of security support from the purchase date will meet the requirement.
Imagine buying hndreds of brand new latest and greatest switches and one month later they say that end of sale is in the next 6 months 😢
Love it…customer abuse is rampant at these companies
Thats why u need to support mikrotik more and probably exclusively recommend over the overpriced Cisco crap!!!
in my country, corporations who have CISCO switches, they will set them up once and do not climb there anymore, why climb there, and so some have been working for 10 years
When your first major switching platform, the Catalyst 5000, had devices in the field with years up time, decades later, you might start pushing people off, via EOL. That said if you work with your VAR you can usually get pretty substantial trade-in credit.
It's that level of engineering why Cisco is still the number one provider of enterprise and data center gear. Many have tried to dislodge them and outside of niche use cases, all have failed.
What's the latest with pfsense
open source HW infrastructure.... we need it
Not good for the planet either, but then these companies and their shareholders value profit over any green credentials..
ciscos not the one who gets hit for turning products into E waste after 2 years instead of 10 the company that brught the product does so they have to pay to have it 'recycled' and so forth the cycle continues
In an organization where we used to have 6506 and 6509 paying yearly M&S eventually costs more than just replacing them with the new whatever.
sure it was a very long project but eventually we have swapped everything for 9300s and 9500s, the TCO made a lot of sense for this.
not saying that 1 year for enterprise gear makes any sense, it does not, this stuff is hella expensive. but it prevents companies from keeping 20 year old gear in production. which is not necessarily a bad thing.
THe problem I have is the discrepency between TAC, HW and SW support. You get switches that get 5 year EOL but only a year or 2 of security updates so you're basically forced to replace them anyways.
there is zero reason why they couldn't just keep supporting old stuff. It's a switch so it's not like it needs much
yea but what did you actually get for swapping? ciscos been pushing a load of shitty 1G switches in 20 feckin 23 remind us why i can go buy a 10 year old cisco/other switch which is 10/40/100G for fractions of the price which are far more performant but hey lets just keep limiting smaller companies and individuals to 1G then try to force 2.5G when 40G is EOL in datacenters
@samcan9997 specifically for us, it made sense since the older gear was more power-hungry, noisy, and required a lot of space. Switcing to 9300s allowed for higher speed uplinks, better on all counts, and over 5 years, we reached ROI compared to 6509s.
I absolutely agree that there are cheaper non-cisco stuff with better numbers, but sometimes it's not a choice you can make. Some companies adhere to the standard enterprise network stack and will never consider alternatives.
Providing much shorter support for infrastructure products which are viewed as much more critical to protect today than in 2014 seems like a great way to invite policymakers to regulate support requirements through law instead...
That’s not gonna happen for a long, long time. It took a tremendous amount of effort to get the attention of lawmakers for right-to-repair.
Fastest option is for companies to complain to their Cisco reps and stop recommending Cisco products to their clients.
Meh it's a non-issue, those that can afford it will pay, those that can't will buy something else
The software support from EOS should last as long as the hardware is expected to last if bought the day before the EOS notice was posted.
good luck recalling all stuff sold everywhere by parties not directly affilated with Cisco
Switches are one thing that I'll let run without updates / being in support for a bit of time.
I wish that was true, but here are a few Cisco Switch CVE's just for this year:
CVE-2023-20024
CVE-2023-20156
CVE-2023-20157
CVE-2023-20158
CVE-2023-20159
CVE-2023-20160
CVE-2023-20161
CVE-2023-20162
CVE-2023-20189
Wait, does this mean we can now move the EOL jokes to Cisco? :-D
I say, less than 10 years support for a good switch is robbery.
I mean… why shouldn’t a switch run 10 sears? It IOS, some protocols and thats it
Cisco has to constantly increase their profits like every other publicly traded company. Line not go up bad, line go up good.
There doesn't seem to be much value in Cisco products outside of the largest 10% of companies and institutions that can just throw endless money towards it
This policy will just move people from their expensive switches down to cheaper ones
Yet the Cisco Nexus 5548UP with an EOL in 2018 and last day of SW support in 2022 is still getting software releases as of 02-Aug-2023 [Version 7.3(14)N1(1)] ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Their guidelines of what they are what they are obligated to do, but they can do more.
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS right, so the intent of my post was just to be careful of absolutes when talking about a Cisco. There are many BU who work on their own schedules and timelines. You may find that their "Small Business" line has different timelines than their bigger DC equipment. From the comments though, it seems your video has given people the impression that "Cisco isn't what it used to be" which is slightly misleading.
@@technicalthug I think their global policy is objective proof their support times are not what they used to be.
This only considers the time after EOL. Wouldn't you need to review and compare the median "Release Date" to "EOL announcement" duration to understand the overall picture of support? Supporting after EOS may be shorter, but product life could be longer?
@@technicalthug That would give an overall average for their product lines but misses the point of the video as you don't know when it will happen to the product you purchase which is the point. If I purchase $20,000 worth of switches and they announce end of sale the next day that gives me less that 2 years to replace $20,000 of equipment.
Cisco is a software company, not a hardware company
Everyone wins with the constant threat of ransomware.
im doing my CCNA thru my Uni at the moment and its a joke. so many things are wrong in it. almost tempted just not do it, it that bad. they used to have good hardware, now its just overpriced crap. and dont even get me started on packet tracer.
If you (people/companies) in the USA or other 1st World country are not happy with this, what to think of us in a 3rd World country? Where each $1 compares to $5-10 in the US? We need these devices, but can not afford them..
no you don't "need" cisco stuff. We don't "need" them in the first world either
Yeah Cisco is terrible their stuff is out of date looking it's old school them ripping off customers as crap they're support it sucks only 4 years that's garbage even 5 years is garbage 10 years should be a standard
just say NO to Cisco? 🤣