The BIG (EoL) Myth.

What does EoL really mean for your enterprise equipment?

As a vendor independent maintenance service provider for enterprise systems, Axentel offers an alternative maintenance solution which provides our customers choices and flexibility in maintaining & refreshing their infrastructure equipment at their terms without influence from their vendors.

To fully understand what your options are you must first understand the process of discontinuation for your enterprise equipment. The term EoL or End of Life is a term that is very inappropriately used among hardware OEM's. It is a term that, by design, instills a sense of urgency in engineers and IT Managers when they hear it. If an EoL announcement has just been released for your equipment, don't panic. The real End of Life term is something known as MTBF or Mean Time Between Failure. This number, displayed in hours, is the actual life expectancy of your hardware before it begins to fail. Of course, very few (if any) organizations are currently maintaining equipment that is 300,000 hours (34.25 years) old but that number comes directly from the OEM . If you look at the MTBF on any datasheet, you will see that the life expectancy far surpasses the EoL/EoS dates by sometimes a decade or more. Most OEM's have a similar process but let's review the Cisco EoL process as our Primary example, shall we?

EOL PROCESS

Step 1 :

End of Life Announcement

This is simply a notification that Cisco will soon stop supporting a product. A feature freeze goes into effect on the platform and no new features or expansions will be added to the product.

Step 2 :

End of Sale (EoS)

Usually around one year after EoL is announced, the product can no longer be ordered through Cisco distribution. The product is still eligible for Cisco maintenance and is still receiving IOS updates and bug fixes.

Step 3 :

End of New Service

At this step, it is not possible to put the equipment under a new Cisco service contract, although existing contracts can be renewed before their expiration.

Step 4 :

End of Software Maintenance Releases

Cisco has now stopped issuing any additional IOS updates for this product.

Step 5 :

End of Contract Renewal

Cisco no longer offers any maintenance contracts on this product.

Step 6 :

Last Date of Support (LDoS)

cisco stops all support for the product. This is their final tactic in the discontinuation process which deems the equipment obsolete thus hoping to force you into a refresh.

So what does this actually mean for your Enterprise equipment?

It means you have options. Probably more thank you thought.

Axentel Specializes in supporting and maintaining EoL equipment and Legacy Systems: IBM, CISCO, EMC, DELL, HP,SUN/ORACLE, NETAPP, JUNIPER and more. Under an Axencare single-governance agreement, you can manage all of your: Network, Storage, Server and backup equipmentno matter how many platforms! So if you have a Cisco Network and IBM Servers with EMC Storage…no problem. Our Engineers are certified to handle whatever mix of equipment you have at whatever stage of life it’s at.