End of sale, end of support, end of life: what each date means for a server or a switch.

Three dates, not one

The milestones come in order: the vendor announces the end of life, stops selling the product, keeps supporting it for some years, then stops supporting it. A buyer loses something different at each step:

• End of sale. The last date to order the product from the vendor. The hardware does not change that day; what changes is that the vendor will not sell you another one.
• End of software maintenance, and later of security fixes. The vendor stops releasing bug fixes for the product's software, and after that stops releasing security fixes. These dates can fall years before support ends.
• Last date of support. After it, the vendor no longer supports, maintains or repairs the product. Cisco calls it the last date of support, HPE end of engineering support, Lenovo end of service.

Cisco publishes the whole schedule

Cisco's end-of-life policy covers most of its hardware and software (Meraki and Splunk products have their own), and each end-of-life notice gives the dates for the part numbers it names. Under the policy:

• The end of sale is typically announced six months ahead, and the last ship date for hardware is three months after the end of sale.
• For customers with an active support contract, hardware support and replacement parts continue for five years after the end of sale, and a new support contract can still be added for one year after it.
• For customers with an active support contract, Cisco provides fixes for critical software bugs reported to its Technical Assistance Center for one year after the end of sale. After that, where available, fixes continue for two years for operating-system software and for one year for application software.

Software can stop before the hardware does

The software dates sit inside the hardware ones, sometimes well inside. On Cisco's notice for the IOS XE 17.3 releases, security fixes ended on 30 September 2023 and the last date of support is 31 March 2027: three and a half years of support with no security patches for that release.

For a device that faces the internet, that is usually the date that decides how long it can stay in service. Check the software milestones on the notice, not just the hardware ones.

HPE and Lenovo: published rules, fewer dates

HPE's networking line works much like Cisco's: the end of sale is generally announced three to six months ahead, and support generally lasts five years after it, a period HPE says it may shorten or extend. For ProLiant servers the firmware is the part to watch. When a server generation goes into post-production, HPE freezes its firmware and drivers into a final Service Pack for ProLiant, and later updates come only as hot fixes. For Gen9 and older ProLiant servers, downloading the SPP or the system ROM firmware needs an active warranty or HPE support agreement; from Gen10 on, the Gen10 SPP (release 2019.12.0 and later) and the system ROM firmware need neither. Security firmware, iLO, controller components and drivers are available without that check.

Lenovo has historically provided service and support for at least five years after a product is withdrawn from marketing, posts end-of-service dates at least 90 days ahead, and sets them by region. After that date the fixes stop. In 2021 Lenovo published a high-severity flaw in the management controller of the System x3550 M3 and x3650 M3 with no fix, because their support had ended at the end of 2019, and recommended that they no longer be used.

Dell publishes no server schedule

Dell publishes no end-of-life schedule for PowerEdge servers. Its own support staff say so on Dell's community forum, and point buyers to the Service Tag, where the support record of one machine is kept.

What Dell does publish shows what end of service means in practice. Ahead of the expiry of Microsoft's 2011 Secure Boot certificates, Dell planned BIOS updates for 14th, 15th and 16th generation PowerEdge servers, and said 12th and 13th generation servers would not receive them, due to their end-of-service status.

What it means for buying end-of-sale hardware

End of sale is not a fault. A machine past its end of sale but inside its support period is a supported machine that the vendor will no longer sell new, and refurbished or secondary-market stock is how it is still bought — to match an estate, to replace a failed unit, or to keep a working platform running at a lower price.

Past the last date of support, nothing more comes from the vendor, and a flaw found later stays open. That suits hardware that is isolated or easy to replace — a lab, a spares pool, a unit for an estate that is itself being retired — and does not suit a device exposed to the internet.

Before buying, find the dates for the exact model: the end-of-life notice for Cisco, HPE's end-of-sale information page for its networking products, the end-of-service lookup for Lenovo, the Service Tag for Dell. Then set them against how long the machine has to stay in service. Our end-of-life register lists discontinued Cisco, Juniper and HPE part numbers with the vendor notice each one comes from.

Our twelve-month warranty covers every condition we sell. On new, it comes with the vendor’s own — on servers, usually 3 years; on refurbished, cover is extendable up to 3 years on request in your quote. The terms are on the warranty page.

For refurbished machines generally, what to check before you buy refurbished covers the questions to put to the seller, and which generation is that server dates a machine whose listing does not say. Each line page, such as Cisco UCS or HPE ProLiant, lists the generations it covers.