Cisco gear expected life

J

jtr8178

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 21, 2008
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I am doing some really rough budget numbers. What can I expect for a life cycle on some Cisco gear like a 2801 router and a 48 port PoE switch? Is 4 years pushing it too much? We usually don't upgrade unless something breaks.
 
I think five years is reasonable. Make sure to include five years of warranty/support costs on your value assessment.
 
we use a 3 year cycle for most gear, but we have gear that has been running for 10 years. In general it is what you want to pay for it warranty and support is what you look at with Cisco.
 
Switches and routers easily go 4 years. Some go much longer than that..plenty of 6 and 7 year old 6500 switches out there.
 
the gear would last forever if you had spare PSU's and fans. those are the only things in them that really fail.

Granted there are exceptions, but mostly it's those 2 items.
 
I'm currently running a 2821 as an edge router and it's been in place since 2006. Works like a champ. I've upgraded the memory in it and flash, but that's about it.

I've not had a problem with it what so ever.
 
They can last forever:

uptime.jpg


That's just uptime, not total life of the device.
 
We always had spare PSU and fans, we've been using 6500 series switches for a while. They are great.

Most companies these days upgrade by warranty. They will run gear until warranties expire, then put out for upgrade.

Our company general rule was either Warranty @ EoL upgrades, or upgrade because of major technology switch, like the move from gigabit to infini band, thats our next move.
 
ChRoNo16 said:
We always had spare PSU and fans, we've been using 6500 series switches for a while. They are great.

Most companies these days upgrade by warranty. They will run gear until warranties expire, then put out for upgrade.

Our company general rule was either Warranty @ EoL upgrades, or upgrade because of major technology switch, like the move from gigabit to infini band, thats our next move.
Click to expand...

Yep...especially on data center switching gear. Starting to finally see those 6500s get upgraded as people move to 10Gb.
 
I had 2950's and 3550's that had been in place for the last 6 years. They would still be operational if I wasn't required to upgrade to match DoD STIG requirements. This is in the desert with tons of dust blowing through them and rats pissing and shitting on them.

Cisco equipment runs forever.
 
Vito_Corleone said:
They can last forever:

uptime.jpg


That's just uptime, not total life of the device.
Click to expand...

Woah that is awesome!

I work for the telco, and I've been told our DMS100 switches have been rebooted only twice in 30 years. Yes, that's 30 years! Those things are massive beasts. So yeah some equipment can go on for a long time. If it's still serving it's purpose then there's no reason to get rid of it unless you can't get parts for it. In the case of the DMS100 Nortel still produces the phone cards and such for it, believe it or not.
 
I've still got some WS-C2948 switches in production that were deployed in 1999-2000. I hope to have all them retired by the end of the summer.
 
We've got a boat load of Cisco 1528/1538 hubs in the office. EoS 2000, still work great.
 
Where I am, we have several hundred 1700 series routers in the field. They've been going strong since 1999. The biggest issue that I have seen with them are the power connectors when a user touches the router and causes it to reboot. Always nice when on a support call. "Ooops, looks like you just rebooted your router by accident."
 
Thanks for the replies. I ended up using 5 years with Smartnet. We are getting screwed now. The person before me decided to do a 5 year rental on 11k worth of equipment for 600 per month. So 36k over 5 years. That does include unlimited tech support and install, but seems heavy considering it is just cisco networking gear and no servers.
 
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