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Identifying End-of-Life and End-of-Sales products

You can save a lot of money by identifying obsolete products in your network that are costing more money to  keep on maintenance contracts than replacement products cost.  Vendors announce their obsolete products with End-of-Life or End-of-Sales postings.  I would like to see the creation of a central repository and format for this information, so that it is easy for anyone to determine which equipment is out of date.  There is a common format in use for security announcements, so why not a similar format for EOL/EOS products?

The advantage to a central repository is that network management vendors can incorporate the data into their products, even building a regular update mechanism, that would allow network administrators to generate periodic reports on the "age of the fleet" of the products in their networks.

Cisco has a start at a centralized repository, but it is lacking a common format that makes it easy to download and incorporate into other systems:
http://supportwiki.cisco.com/ViewWiki/index.php/Category:EOS

The Cisco repository is a wiki, which seems an interesting approach.  I wasn't able to edit one of the pages.   I also found that the Cisco 7300 Content Engine quickly wound up in a circular URL reference and didn't give the dates of the EOL/EOS announcements.  Sad  If it is true wiki, it needs to be editable by anyone.  If it is to be maintained only by Cisco, it should say that and not have editing links.

I found the EOL/EOS wiki from a link on the Cisco Learning Network home page, under the heading Related Cisco Links.  Once on the support wiki page, I found the link by scrolling to the bottom of the box labeled "Select a Product, Technology, or Solution".  Let me know if you're aware of a good source for EOL/EOS data.  Cisco has an internal EOL/EOS database, but some people within Cisco want to sell that data instead of using it to allow customers to better manage their product base.

 I wonder how difficult it would be to parse EOL/EOS announcements that are emailed out to customers as a way to automatically populate a public database.  In general, it would depend on whether the messages have a small number of common formats that could be easily parsed.

  -Terry

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About tslattery

Terry Slattery, CCIE #1026, is a senior network engineer with decades of experience in the internetworking industry. Prior to joining Chesapeake NetCraftsmen as a full time consultant, Terry was the founder and CTO of Netcordia, and inventor of NetMRI, a suite of network management products. Terry started Netcordia as a consulting company in 2000 and transitioned to a network management product company in 2003. During the consulting days, he used his network design and implementation skills to lead a team in the design and implementation of a high availability network at a brokerage clearing house. Terry is the former President and founder of Chesapeake Computer Consultants, Inc., a networking and computer systems training and consulting company. He co-invented and patented the vLab(tm) internet-based remote lab system. He is co-author of the McGraw Hill text Advanced IP Routing in Cisco Networks. Terry led the team that developed the current Cisco IOS user interface under contract to Cisco Systems. Terry is experienced in the design and installation of large TCP/IP based networks and is a successful network protocol instructor. He is the second Cisco Certified Internetworking Expert (CCIE) #1026 and the first outside of Cisco. He enjoys membership on the Vanderbilt University Engineering School’s Industrial Advisory Board and the IEEE.

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