On Jan 15, 2011, at 12:43 PM, James R Grinter wrote: > I like Ironport boxes too, but they seem to drop support for older hardware, > requiring new capital purchase, more often than I'd prefer. > > Anti-spam is, like AV, something which you can't afford to run without > updates.
I can't speak for the way they operate today, but when we were working on Ironport e-mail security appliances at UT Austin, they had partnered with Dell to base their systems on the devices that had the longest guaranteed hardware support contracts, so that their hardware had the longest possible lifetimes on contract. You may be aware that I am not a fan of Dell, but Ironport did a very good job at handling the integration of these systems and hiding all those Dell-specific aspects of the hardware that I didn't (and don't) like. We were faced with doing upgrades of the fleet of C600s during the time I was there, because the old boxes had been in place for several years before I arrived, and they were finally going EOL. But I got the impression that when the boxes had been installed that the particular model in question was already a couple of years old, so overall that seems like a very reasonable lifespan to me. They were also more than happy to work with us to get the replacement hardware in place and fully integrated into the operating cluster, and were fine with us holding onto the old hardware and shipping it back to them at our leisure. And on the one occasion we did have a hardware failure in one of the old boxes that was still on support, they were very cooperative in pre-shipping the replacement box, helping us get it online ASAP, and then allowing us to send the dead system back when it was convenient. And I have yet to see a hardware swap-out that was as dead simple as what Ironport had put together. The service is expensive, I grant you that. But I can't fault them for their hardware choice or what I saw of their lifecycle management system. -- Brad Knowles <b...@shub-internet.org> LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list Tech@lists.lopsa.org https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
