Hardware / Software Life Cycle

Hardware Life Cycle

On lists of hardware recommendations, you will see a status value which may be one of these four options:

Early Adoption – equipment is new and is undergoing validation testing in company's network. Sites installing hardware of this type do so at their own risk but we do encourage a certain amount of creativity and look forward to receiving feedback on the community's experiences.
We recommend early adoption hardware is installed in a low risk part of the network.

Current Recommended – equipment is recommended wherever possible for new installations.

Current Alternati ve – equipment is still current and supported, but the latest Company networking engineering standard

  recommends an alternative choice of hardware.
Sites may still install this hardware if they already have many installations of this type or spare hardware which they wish to redeploy.

Migration Recommended – equipment is still current and supported, but an End of Sales or End of Life date has been announced by the vendor and an ITC End of Support date has been announced.
Hardware is on an End of Life path and therefore sites should avoid installing new hardware of this type where possible. New network features that the company may wish to deploy are not guaranteed to work on hardware of this type but should work in most cases.

Migration Mandatory – hardware is nearing End of Life and must be replaced by the Mandatory Migration Date.
ITC will only support hardware beyond this date for a short period of time to allow for hardware to be ordered and installed. Hardware of this type newly installed beyond the End of Support Date is not supported by ITC and may result in an audit LTS condition.

Obsolete – equipment has either exceeded the ITC End of Support Date, or is no longer supported by the vendor and is no longer compliant.
These devices must not be installed on the Company network. Please note that hardware that may appear to be current but can no longer meet the minimum IOS requirements (due to memory or flash limitations) is also considered obsolete and must be removed from the network.

As hardware ages it will go through each of these phases in turn. In general we expect the telecomms hardware life cycle from Early Adoption to Obsolete to be around six to eight years but this is dependent on Cisco's life cycle dates and how early in the life cycle a newly purchased individual piece of hardware is.

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Software Life Cycle

On lists of software/IOS recommendations, you will see a status value which may be one of these four options:

Early Adoption – software is new and is undergoing validation testing in Company's network. Sites installing this version of code do so at their own risk but we do encourage a certain amount of creativity and look forward to receiving feedback on the community's experiences.
We recommend early adoption code is installed in a low risk part of the network.

Current Recommended – software is current and supported, and is tested in large parts of the Company network. This is the code to use wherever possible

Current Alternative – software is current and supported, but is not the code of choice.
This may be due to some minor bugs or a software feature is not fully supported. Engineers should try and avoid installing new hardware running this version of code where practical.  

Migration Recommended – software may suffer from non-critical bugs experienced in the Company network.
New network features that the company may wish to deploy are not guaranteed to work on these code versions. Network engineers should aggressively work to migrate equipment onto a current recommended version in a practical timeframe.

Migration Mandatory – software suffers from serious security vulnerabilities or critical bugs experienced in the Company network or is reaching end of life with the vendor/ITC.
Network engineers should aggressively work to migrate equipment onto a current recommended version as soon as possible.

Obsolete – software has either exceeded the ITC End of Support Date, or is no longer supported by the vendor and is no longer compliant.
Software of this version must not be installed on the Company network. Please note that hardware that may appear to be current may be running obsolete versions of software and should be upgraded to a more recent version. 

As hardware and software ages it will go through each of these phases in turn. In general we expect the telecomms hardware life cycle from Early Adoption to Obsolete to be around six to eight years but the software life cycle may be much shorter than this depending on the bugs experienced on the network.