EOS and EOL
EOS (End Of Sale) and EOL (End Of Life) is when Cisco no longer manufactures, sells, or supports a product. It is difficult to keep track of this – but you can sign up to receive alerts via email at: http://www.cisco.com/pcgi-bin/Support/FieldNoticeTool/field-notice - these alerts include not only EOL & EOS info, bur also security bugs in the IOS, patch info, etc. It is a lot of emails, just to warn you (about 5 per week).
This knowledge is very important. For example, most Engineers believe that a Cisco 2620 is still a valid router selection for a customer. Wrong – it is EOL !!! Here are some EOL/EOS products to be aware of:
1600 and 1600R EOL – these routers are no longer sold by Cisco.
2600 Series (non-XM, eXtra Memory) EOL – these models are no longer sold by Cisco. Recommended router – the 2621XM
3620, 3640, 3640A, and 3660 (non-CO) EOL – these models are no longer sold by Cisco. The 3600 series CPE routers have end-of-sale date of 12/31/2003. These routers will not be sold after this date and can be replaced with the 3700 Series routers listed above. The 3600 Series routers will however be supported for some period (even after the end-of-sale date). It is recommended that no new customers be provisioned with 3600 routers. Customers that already have the 3600 Series routers deployed can continue to be supported.
7204 EOL - with the introduction of new system-level packages based on NPE-225 and NPE-175 and the introduction of Cisco 7200VXR series, Cisco Systems announces end of sale of Cisco 7204 Router, NPE-100, and NPE-150 effective April 30, 2000.
7204 VPN Bundles EOL – both the 7204VXR/VPN/400K9 and the 7204VXR400/VPNK9 are EOL - the upgrade path is the 7206VXR, with NPE-400 processor with 256 MB of system memory, I/O controller with dual 10/100 Fast Ethernet ports, AC power, IPsec/3DES Cisco IOS Software, and VPN Acceleration Module.
7206 EOL – this router uses the NPE-200 network processing engine - Cisco Systems announces the end of sale of the 7206 and the NPE-200. The recommended upgrade path is the 7206VXR and the NPE-225. The NPE-225 has a 263 MHz RM5271 RISC processor vs the NPE-200 200-MHz RISC processor. The 7206VXR has a faster backplane than the CISCO7206 (up to 1 GBPS versus 500 KBPS), and has integrated multi-service interchange (MIX) functionality.