How long do you keep a router in production?
What is your cycle for replacement of equipment?
For a PC, you usually depreciate it over 3 years, and can make it last 5 years, but then you are stretching the functionality, especially if you upgrade the OS, tho it is not uncommon to see companies still on XP and IE6.
I'm wondering what is the rule of thumb for routing hardware? Same shelf life as a PC or you keep the hardware much longer?
How long do you keep a router in production?
What is your cycle for replacement of equipment?
Hi Franck
It really depends on the type of network you are running, the rate at
which new features & bandwidth are required, and the availability of
software and hardware upgrades. Also, in a lot of cases it is vendor
driven - devices that are still very much in production are forced to
be replaced because of vendor product lifecycle and the phasing out of
support, even when serving their requirements well.
Care to elaborate a little more on your planned scenario?
Cheers
Heath
Don't have much to add other than Heath's response is pretty much what I would have said.
It really all depends on your business needs as well as policy, or standards you need to meet....
I'm looking at various scenario, but basically it is looking at IPv6 in fact.
It seems to me, that using a router/network appliance today for IPv6 will need to be replaced in 3 years or less.
Looking at past, anything older than 3 years is not a viable solution for deploying IPv6.
So I feel that routing/network appliance equipment have a life cycle similar to a PC, despite the fact as someone pointed out, they will run fine for many many years.
Well a lot of routers even 3 years ago support IPv6. You can dual-stack pretty much any router today if you have
the right IOS. But I do understand your concern, if you want to future proof your purchase, I'd think any modern
router today with a good support contract will take care of you for quite some time.
Make sure it's not close to EOL.
What kind of router are you considering? Is this for a large network? What are the network needs?
If you can do a business case to support replacing routers every 3years you
doing much better then most. IMO a router should last 5 yrs on the book,
but I expect to get more life then then from it. You core today
is tomorrow's edge. I've seen more then one network with 10 yo kit still
being used.
-jim
From: Franck Martin
Sent: Saturday, October 02, 2010 4:23 PM
To: nanog@nanog.org
Subject: router lifetimeHow long do you keep a router in production?
It depends on its purpose in the network, the change in requirements for that purpose over time, and the vendor's support of the device.
A router handing 10Meg of traffic between offices might last until the vendor abandons all support of the unit. A router in a segment where traffic rates are changing rapidly might need replacement sooner. Sometimes it is the introduction of some new technology that drives a change in equipment if the new feature provides some overall benefit.
What is your cycle for replacement of equipment?
No set in stone replacement cycle.
Short answer: 8 years
Long answer: we are an academic network and when we upgrade the routers we buy top of the line routers with speeds far in excess of what we need then. If and when we need to upgrade, we usually pull out the main card and upgrade to the latest processor. We never buy a router with just 2x the horse power and slots we need. When we buy we buy with 10-15x the horsepower we need.
-Hank
I still have a few Cisco 2600 Series routers in service from 9 years ago.
Some of those here soon are being replaced with the 2800/3800 series
integrated service routers.
These routers don't handle a lot as far as traffic, so even the 2600 series
routers are still performing the tasks at hand very well. Only moving to
the newer series routers to get everything in one "package".
Well a lot of routers even 3 years ago support IPv6. You can dual-stack pretty much any router today if you have
the right IOS. But I do understand your concern, if you want to future proof your purchase, I'd think any modern
router today with a good support contract will take care of you for quite some time.
Make sure it's not close to EOL.
What kind of router are you considering? Is this for a large network? What are the network needs?
Well it is not for me really. It is a kind of a survey. In your environment, how often do you replace your gear?
I found out that switch gear from cisco with layer 3 routing, which are EOL today do not do IPv6 (at layer 3). Cisco Firewalls do not support well IPv6 unless you have upgraded this year, and for load balancers, you are out of luck. So basically anything which is EOL today has IPv6 issues while still much in use in production environment. Is that a fair assessment? I found out also that some gear with fancy IPv4 stuff do not do the same in IPv6, What about Juniper?
Then there is the IPv6 is not done at hardware level, because software is fast enough for the current IPv6 bandwidth, but then if you expect to keep your gear for 8 years... Will you have to replace it much earlier than expected?
It seems to me on the desktop/server, IPv6 is there free of charge (enabled by default), but on the network, switching to IPv6 is not free nor trivial.
I'm tasked to replace our core switches which run Extreme 6800's. You are right that some older gear says they support IPv6,
but then you find out it's not 100% fully compliant. Our switch is about 6-8 years old I beleive so it's time to update them.
We're thinking about the Cisco 6504e. Anything that is pretty modern that we feel will yield us another 6-8 years.
I only have a handful of juniper firewalls laying around for lab equipment, so I don't really have that much experience with them.
We also need to get IPv6 space from ARIN so that we can fully support IPv6 natively. Our plan is to dual-stack our edge routers,
so it is ultimately up to the endpoints to support IPv6. We don't want to deal with any tunneling protocols like Teredo for IPV6.
Ability to route IPv6 != ability to route IPv6 as well as IPv4. Depending on the hardware, there will always be unavoidable tradeoffs, which tend to be either in reduced throughput capacity, typically noticed on particularly on software-switching platforms, or the number of routes/ACLs/etc you can put in the CAM of a hardware-switching box.
Most hardware sold today has plenty of headroom to do both, but don't forget that flinging v6 packets around is inherently more resource-intensive than flinging v4.
-C
If you can do a business case to support replacing routers every 3years you
doing much better then most. IMO a router should last 5 yrs on the book,
but I expect to get more life then then from it. You core today
is tomorrow's edge. I've seen more then one network with 10 yo kit still
being used.
Agree. If you're large enough to have your own pool of replacement
hardware for anything critical, then using it until it fails isn't a
bad strategy. That being said, support for fixing of software security
bugs has probably shortened the production life of a lot of perfectly
useful hardware.
One risk people haven't mentioned is the risk of leaving it in
production so long that people think it is fake 
Hell, we still have Windows 2000 and IE6.
--Curtis
People tend to want/expect faster graphics performance, faster CPUs, more RAM for bigger (or more bloated) applications.
A router handling T1 aggregation (i.e. cisco 7206, PA-MC-T3, M13 mux) 10 years ago will still handle T1 aggregation today (assuming you still have T1 customers). Over that time period, the only major change is that with routing table growth, routers that were able to handle full routes no longer can...so you either have to upgrade the NPE board to one that can hold 512MB or more or give up full routes. And with the widebank28 muxes, you just have to replace the mux controller cards every few years as they tend to burn out.