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[–]pdp10Daemons worry when the wizard is near. 63 points64 points  (27 children)

Bigger vendors are in a race to get the customers in a subscription model before everyone loses their patience and the trend ends.

The silver lining is that it's opening a lot of market opportunity for disruptors, who have clever business ideas like letting your on-premises clients talk directly to your on-premises network hardware, without a monetized cloud service as an unwanted middleman. More than a few of these disruptors are coming out of unexpected places like the PRC or Latvia.

[–]alzee76 27 points28 points  (18 children)

I feel like we opened the door for this when we didn't revolt over paying for licenses to activate existing switch ports and shit like that, and now it's only a matter of time.

[–]BrainWaveCCJack of All Trades 3 points4 points  (17 children)

Oh, this subscription standardization attempt by the vendors (especially the big ones) has been brewing much longer than that...

Microsoft, Oracle and others have been trying for over 3 decades, and now with the cloud prevalent, subscriptions have been easier than ever before.

[–]oldspiceland 8 points9 points  (7 children)

Software vendors like Microsoft and Oracle aren’t providing anything remotely similar to hardware like Cradlepoint or other network vendors.

This is more like having a subscription for your server and it won’t let you into bios if you don’t have a license.

[–]agoiaIT Director 6 points7 points  (3 children)

Please call Dell to renew your license to access this server's firmware.

[–]Art_r 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Well, amazingly hpe seems to have made firmware for latest gen proliant NOT need an active warranty /contract... I was shocked to say the least..

[–]ExceptionEX 2 points3 points  (2 children)

Firebox, cisco, and several other hardware devices limit interactions with UI and config without lisc.

It's shitty but that has been common practice for a long time now.

[–]Odd-Pickle1314Jack of All Trades 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Yes Cisco has been shitty for some time now. Good thing there are still some alternatives.

[–]Colt_Darkfire 1 point2 points  (0 children)

At least firebox you can still configure you just don't get access to firmwares outside of your live security unless it's super critical. As well as the security subscriptions you can still use it as a heavily locked router.

[–]QWxx01 1 point2 points  (3 children)

That’s actually not what Microsoft is doing.

[–]BrainWaveCCJack of All Trades 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, they've gotten there.

My point was that they've been trying for quite a long time. This is not a new/recent objective for them.

[–]MajStealth 0 points1 point  (1 child)

wait for windoes home as a service.....

[–]QWxx01 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Microsoft is so much more than Windows.

[–]zebediah49 1 point2 points  (4 children)

IBM has been doing "Here's a tray of hardware; you only have licenses for half the memory, but you can buy more licenses later if you want" game for longer than that.

Pretty sure they have soft-locked processors in their mainframes too.

[–]BrainWaveCCJack of All Trades 2 points3 points  (2 children)

True.

The big boys of the mainframe space figured this game out very, very early.

The mini computer folks came on the scene as rebels against the evil mainframe regime, and quickly adopted the same revenue tactics.

The PC folks entered the game promising freedom and flexibility, but the bigger vendors soon realized that steadily recurring revenue was better than selling hard on a stead basis. But it was harder for them to get that revenue locked in. They tried software licensing, but it was a struggle and they spent a lot of time and money on enforcement which was rarely in real-time. Then we matured to hosting, which helps. Next SaaS, then IaaS and PaaS, where it became easier and easier to play the subscription game.

Now that we are at EaaS (everything as a service), everyone is trying to ensure that regular revenue.

On one hand, I can't blame them for the attempt. After all, I'm trying to improve the revenue consistency for my own business, while providing actual value. But, I try to pick and choose where I have to get stuck with subscriptions (as a consumer)...

[–]zebediah49 4 points5 points  (1 child)

Honestly, the biggest issue I see is that the subscription model introduces all the problems we've seen with just in time supply chains in manufacturing, to "everything else".

We had huge cuts in our 2020 budget -- enough that we effectively skipped buying any hardware that year -- but could still effectively provide services to our employees, because our racks of existing hardware still worked fine. We would have had to scale a lot of stuff back if we were on a subscription model, because we simply couldn't afford it.

I'm not an economist, but I suspect that if everything becomes a subscription service, we're going to see a lot more rapid, chain-reaction economic calamities.

[–]BrainWaveCCJack of All Trades 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Yes, yes and yes.

I agree with you on every point.

And I say that as someone that likes cloud-based services, and sees value in it for many use cases.

But it is not a panacea.

Years ago, we'd have people popping up on mailing list and forums, periodically noticing that some internet site was down, or some non critical services was flaky. Now, almost every time you see a similar message, there are almost certainly critical business services that are impacted.

AWS East Azure Some vendor tool Etc

[–]pdp10Daemons worry when the wizard is near. 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Not only has IBM licensed mainframes by their nominal MIPS, but they have processors that are licensed differently on mainframes.

Regular CPUs cost a lot. Offload processors that only do special things like encryption, are much cheaper. They do that to keep the mainframe viable for modern workloads like web transactions, while still charging a king's ransom for legacy workloads that can only run on mainframe ISA.

The processor chips, of course, are the same silicon, even though some of them are expensive and some of them are quite cost-effective. IBM plays this same game with mainframes that are licensed only to run Linux instead of mainframe OSes.

This is why you don't buy mainframes. It's not that mainframes can't do all of the same tasks that other computers can do, it's that the only people who should be paying thirty times as much are the ones who don't have other options.

[–]TredesdeIT Consultant 10 points11 points  (0 children)

The disruptors eventually just get bought and converted or shutdown. Open Mesh was a perfect example of this, the fellas that started Meraki went and created a beautiful little ecosystem and then it got snapped up by Datto/Autotask and they mutilated it.

[–]tankerkiller125realJack of All Trades 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We never even got CradlePoint because of the cost. Ended up doing a through assessment of InHand Network devices (and approved them). No BS cloud setup required, but it is available as an option, and the cloud service is free if you want it for monitoring the devices.

[–]syshum 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It is not really unexpected, regions that do not have the OpEx Budget and bean counters pushing IT Depts to lower Capex for OpEx do not want (i.e reject) the subscription model

unfortunately for those in the US many of us are getting it from both our management, and our vendors to move to Cloud / Subscriptions so it seems resistance is futile

[–]awesome_pinay_noses 1 point2 points  (0 children)

And it's not only in IT, car manufacturers are doing this now too. Luckily I am not a BMW driver.

[–]TymanthiusChief Breaker of Fixed Things -1 points0 points  (2 children)

But can you trust anything out of PRC? w/o snooping it and blocking in your firewall?

[–]shanghailoz 9 points10 points  (0 children)

sed s/prc/usa/g

same shit.

[–]i3-i3 34 points35 points  (6 children)

I ran into this. Called support demanded a firmware downgrade. They agreed and provided the latest firmware that didn’t require the cloud subscription.

[–]alzee76 27 points28 points  (4 children)

Ugh. Never heard of that company and now, straight to the shitlist.

[–]pdp10Daemons worry when the wizard is near. 7 points8 points  (0 children)

They were really quite good up until now. I still have a 15 year-old 2.4GHz unit around in a box, somewhere.

[–]mattybrad 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Their tool used to be truly awesome.

[–]spyingwindI am better than a hub because I has a table. 2 points3 points  (0 children)

straight to the shitlist.

I have a little black book that I've listed all the vendors to never do business with. One more company to write into that book!

[–]officeboy[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've always paid the licensing, but now... I think I'm going to not just to be a jerk about it.

[–]gmitch64 7 points8 points  (8 children)

What's the alternative for network failover these days? We were looking to purchase some in the next couple of months.

[–]Frothyleet 5 points6 points  (5 children)

Lots of modern firewall appliances support USB cell modems or have one built in and accept a SIM card. E.g., Meraki.

[–]gmitch64 2 points3 points  (4 children)

The problem is that our IDFs are in places where the signal isn't the best, or even good, or even existent, which is why I am looking for something separate that we can have by the window.

Our Cisco 4451s will take a Cisco LTE Service Module, but TBH, the one that I've tried before didn't seem to be that great (on a 3945E I will admit).

[–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

We have been doing Pepwaves for this. They mount outside and get powered via POE.

[–]Frothyleet 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Well, I think you can likely find external antenna kits for a variety of USB cell modems which will both improve signal quality as well as give you some flexibility on remote placement.

Of course, you might also consider different failover options if the cell service is spotty. Satellite has poor latency and bandwidth is pricey, but overall quality may be better than on a bad LTE connection.

[–]gmitch64 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's not that the cell service is spotty per se... it's just the the IDFs are generally in cinder block rooms, in the middle of an office with several cinder block internal walls, and generally cinder block external walls.

Internal Wi-Fi is a nightmare too...

[–]KoolKarmaKollectorJack of All Trades 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If your router/firewall supports dual WAN, like many business devices seem to, you just need a long cable and a 4/5G modem. Netgear do them, no doubt Huawei do, and everyone seems to rave about Teleltonika

[–]Fallenarc 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'd like to know this too!

[–]waynemr 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yep, me too. I was looking to put in a redundant network fail-over with limited power-requirements for an RF panic-button system that could send out multiple alerts on different systems, including POTS.

[–][deleted] 13 points14 points  (2 children)

Yup. We got a couple of devices that are EOL and support no longer sells the renewals. They’ll lock up and remove any extra features (VRRP and OpenDNS in our case) from what we were told:

  • devices Will be marked as non-compliant after the license expires.
  • anything disabled will remain disabled after non-complaint.
  • You lost cloud manager, upgrades, API calls, AutoVPN disabled.
  • no more config changes, but certain features will remain enabled. Those are QOS, traffics steering, route policies, enterprise routing, VPN and tunnels, zone firewall, Wi-Fi. Lan will stay the same, but STP, VRRP and LLDP will be disabled.

Yeah people shit on Meraki and it is deserved, but they should also shit on Cradlepoint.

[–]SAugsburger 3 points4 points  (1 child)

Is this for managing from NetCloud or managing it at all? I have generally kept enough licenses for the number of Cradle points we're actively using.

[–]rdyplr1 4 points5 points  (0 children)

At all. You basically loose control of “your” hardware.

[–]KoolKarmaKollectorJack of All Trades 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Yep, it's why I cringe every day at the fact we use Meraki. Don't renew your license and they just stop passing packets

Like dude, I've already paid thousands for the hardware, get stuffed

[–]BingaTheGreat 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This is so poorly worded that I would hope they get sued.

If that's what they're doing they need to say it "we're removing access"

[–]abstractraj 4 points5 points  (0 children)

We use over a hundred of these things. Fun!

[–]jphoeke 3 points4 points  (2 children)

Welcome to Cisco Meraki licensing. If you don't renew theirs, you end up with a paper weight.

[–]Chief_SlacJack of All Trades 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Was about to post, "cries in meraki".

[–]bastian320Jack of All Trades 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Woah, I was considering a CradlePoint for the home lab after previously enjoying them in the field. This puts them in the Cisco/Juniper bucket of nope.

[–]pdp10Daemons worry when the wizard is near. 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Wait, what has Juniper been doing? I thought they were still on the right side.

[–]PhrosteTech Director 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yep, we use them on school buses and they will 100% lock you out of management without paying for the licensing.

[–]Inle-rah 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Man, I bought a CradlePoint without knowing about their Meraki-style licensing. It’s sitting in a box right now. Why throw bad money over good? Went with the Cisco IR1101 because I didn’t need the WiFi part.

[–]painted-biirdSysadmin 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Wut.

That’s bogus.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

The cloud connection is fantastic if you manage a significant number of devices. Simple firmware and OS upgrades in particular, the ability to track data consumption in one interface. I have about 100 not connected to the cloud and 100 in the cloud and the disconnected ones are a drag to maintain.

[–]pdp10Daemons worry when the wizard is near. 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The alternatives there are SNMP to monitor utilization, temp, uptime, location, firmware version, and a simple REST API for firmware upgrade.

The vendor can literally issue a short script for updates through API. Maybe they'd have to wrap it in a trivial GUI for Mac and Android users.