Any sign of supply chain returning to normal?

Mailman List Mirror (Read Only)
21

> The oem ain't gonna support the resold device either.

Many vendors support resold gear through a recertification cost in order to bring it back under a support contract.

In my world, support ends after 6 months. Period.

It's even worse than that. Mediatek, for example, provides a devkit to
new customers, still, based on the obsolete
LEDE-17 release of openwrt, e.g. 6+ year code. I recently pointed out
to a marketing manager pimping how wifi-7 was going to fix latency on
wifi in 3-4 years, how crappy the factory driver was, compared to
what's now in linux

and asked when they were going to ship that instead, to a blank
stare... And yes, I know of several "new" customers for that chipset
that are using that obsolete code, too scared and incompentent to make
the jump to a more current OS.

If you think that's bad, qualcomm is worse, and I just established a
new record, I think, with truly ancient broadcom's openwrt based
devkit that just shipped with the "NEW" triband tp-link deco series...
Deco XE75 | AXE5400 Tri-Band Mesh Wi-Fi 6E System | TP-Link -
I can hardly bring myself to talk to the sea of CVEs and incompetence
in there... you can start with them STILL shipping dnsmasq 2.62... and
linux 3.3.8.

I used to be really proud that openwrt was used by all these major
manufacturers, but I'd also thought that they'd
have been responsible enough to at least keep up with CVEs, and stay
within a few years of the mainline.

If you are wondering why WiFi-6 works so badly out of the box, or why
ipv6 is not rolling out, you don't have to look much further. The
really, really sad thing, is that the ODM in these cases, just slaps
the devkit and a fancy gui
on top of it, and ships the product, with no further support.

So I kind of view recycling routers, with newer software, as a great
way to clean up the present ecosystem. And if you looked at the first
url I pasted above, with 4x more throughput, and 10x less latency, on
"obsolete", hw.

22

We have customers being forced to use EOL products that they previously replaces as they continue to wait on the vendor for new EQ.
Paul

23

And this is the case for Transport gear as well, not just IP/MPLS/Ethernet.

Mark.

24

So we've been running Arista's 7508E devices as core switches in data centres to support 1Gbps, 10Gbps and 100Gbps internal cabling (purely Layer 2, no IP).

We suddenly got told that they are now EoS/EoL some time back (I probably should have done a better job tracking this, but I tend to rely on vendor notifications for that based on my Cisco/Juniper experience). So Arista advised we move to the 7508R3, which doesn't make sense for us because we are currently only using 2x slots from the chassis, and nowhere close to max'ing out the line card or switch fabric capacity.

It just didn't make sense to us to spend hundreds-of-thousands of $$ for no extra benefit in performance or technology (Layer 2 is very simple).

So we decided to keep the the 7508E, even if they are EoL. The box is brain-dead, runs fine, shifts bits nice and good, and hums along quietly.

I can't fathom why a box like that has already been EoL'ed. It isn't long in the tooth, and still has plenty of bite in it. But, we also need to use common sense, and for us, swapping it out just to maintain "support" isn't worth the cash. There are options for cold sparing...

Mark.

25

When I had my battle with Cisco over LDPv6 vs. SR(v6) in 2020, I told them that Covid has really changed the landscape, and people (read: their customers) no longer have money to spend like they did, for a multitude of reasons, not the top of which is a lack. of. money.

I said to them that they need to focus on helping customers answer their "why", and not continue with the old model of having sales meetings and assigning $$ values against customer names for the year, as if ants visit PoP's and chew routers down to smithereens as a matter of course.

People no longer have money to spend on things that don't add value. And while routers do add value, how vendors choose to make money from them beyond selling the hardware and providing decent support is what erodes that value, and customer trust.

Users will delete an app in 5 seconds if they launch it and it doesn't do what it claims in a way they perceive as value. Service providers will do the exact same thing to vendors that act like disappointing apps competing for space on your phone and space in your mind.

Mark.

26

That's engineering, understanding what risks and compromises are worth
carrying. If you do it by the book, you're not even needed, just
0-rate AS/PS services to your RFP and the vendor is happy to do it by
the book for you.
And fully agreed, in many cases it makes sense to run boxes to the
ground until they physically stop working. You just need to figure out
how to handle the MTTR well.

27

We are going to need more 100Gbps data centre switching in other PoP's in the coming months, and we like the 7508E for this, even if Arista have EoL'ed it. So for those builds, we'll grab them off the open market, and cold spare with a full chassis in copy. Way cheaper than when we bought them from Arista, even with the ongoing mark-up on the pre-owned space.

Arista are also not developing anymore new or maintenance code for the supervisor that runs on the 7508E, but we are fine with that because this is not an Internet-facing box, and is only doing Layer 2 with features that will never change (802.1Q and LACP is about as advanced as it gets, for us).

Mark.

28

I've heard that some vendors are prematurely EoS/EoL'ing kit as a result of
the silicon shortages - and redesigning kit to use silicon that's easier to
get hold of.

Simon

29

This was my suspicion, because we started using this box in 2017. I can't remember when it launched, but I'd imagine a year or two earlier.

We have boxes from 2014 with other vendors still in service and fully supported. So we were not going to be bullied into new hardware we didn't need.

Mark.

30

Simon,

That is correct in most cases. Fabs are changing and the time needed to manufacture is limited and most vendors are opt’ing to EoL/EoS gear early to move to newer tech and cannot risk the time to manufacture older silicon and spares that could be used for newer silicon.