[c-nsp] Fwd: Alternantive to REB(route bridge Encapsulation)-2nd try

[Justin M. Streiner]

On Mon, 18 Aug 2008, Lamar Owen wrote:

> On Sunday 17 August 2008 05:05:30 Gert Doering wrote:
>> From the comments seen on this list, I don't think that any sort of L2VPN
>> on 7500s is a good idea.
>
>> 7500 is pretty much a dead and unsupported platform these days.
>
> [snip]
> 
> Not all folk using older Cisco gear for core routing are financially able to
> do forklift upgrades.  Some people, in this day of shrinking IT budgets and
> lowering bandwidth costs/margins (at least to NSP's; the enterprise user is
> seeing the opposite problem; for example, my OC3's base tariff went UP $1,000
> per month thanks to tariff changes by the NECA), simply don't have the budget
> to write off their investment in older gear and drop in a newer platform.

I don't think the original comment was intended as a knock on your 
organization's financial status (or any other organization's financial
status for that matter) financial status.  The Cisco 7500 series routers 
were and still are great routers - they served my network well for a great 
many years, but they are in fact at the end of their life cycle.  If you 
can still use them to do what you need to do and they satisfy your 
operational requirements, then I hope they continue to work well for you 
for as long as needed.

More to the point of what I think Gert was getting at is that since the 
7500 series is end-of-life, you have the potential to get stuck if you 
need to get support from Cisco.  There is also the possibility that 
whatever feature you need may not be available in future releases of IOS 
for that platform, or new releases for that platform may be suspended 
entirely.  Replacement hardware will have to come from the secondary 
market since Cisco normally doesn't RMA end-of-life parts.

Some organizations have policies that require them to keep vendor support 
on any piece of gear they have in production.  That by nature forces them 
to stay ahead of the end-of-life curve, or at least be cognizant of the 
end-of-life dates for the gear they use.  As a result, those upgrades 
get worked into their long-term capital planning cycles.  I'm not 
suggesting that this is right or wrong...

Since this has the potential to drift off-topic for this list, this will 
be my only contribution to this thread.

Regards,
jms