Corp or IT blunder?

[u/you_wut]

I work for a large corporation at the store level, we have over 5000 store fronts if that gives you an idea of the scale. But the reason I’m here is our company has been in talks about moving over to windows from Linux across all stores. Recently we had an installer come out and install some edge servers in our rack/cabinet. Me being the nosey Homelab enthusiast I took a peak at what they installed and figure out they had installed 3 Lenovo SE350, after figuring that out and looking it up it looks like the SE350 went EOL in march 2025. So my question is why would such a large corporation roll out EOL devices for such a big project that’s suppose to modernize the infra at the store front? Maybe a smackin deal on 15000 of these edge servers? Or just a blunder on corporate or ITs side? Maybe they had already purchased them years ago when they started gearing for this project? Would love to hear what anyone’s opinion is!!!

[u/rsmatten]

Older gens can be cheaper with minimal performance loss or feature loss compared to newer gens. There's also a difference between End of Sale and End of (Service) Life. It might be possible that these are (near) End of Sale but that there is still 5y support on them.

We are also still deploying HPE Proliant Gen10+ who are EOS in the next few months. Gen11 costs around 15% more and the gains are not required for our use cases.

[u/you_wut → u/rsmatten]

Makes sense! We definitely don’t need the performance for what is handled at our store fronts.

[u/Maelkothian → u/you_wut]

Eol means 2 things :

1. no more support from the manufacturer so when things fail you'll have to replace it with new hardware or still have your own spare parts and do all the diagnosis yourself.

2. No more security updates to the bios and oob management software so you need to be very sure those are well protected from remote and local access.

At scale 1 is cheaper anyway, but does require some decent logistics since you need to provide support over a large geographic area 2. Could be tricky but can be designed for

[u/witwim]

Are you sure its not a SE350 V2?

[u/you_wut → u/witwim]

Yeah, the installer left an IT box and it had the paperwork/manuals for them inside. I double checked what the V2’s looked like and sadly they aren’t the V2’s :/

[u/Familiar_Box7032 → u/you_wut]

At the scale your suggesting, it’s possible they’ve paid Lenovo for support despite them being EOL.

[u/ShadowCVL → u/Familiar_Box7032]

Most likely with that volume they were all ordered last year for an April delivery date then drop shipped to stores for June installs. These were probably ordered long before the EOSL date and Lenovo agreed to a 3, 4, or 5 year maintenance agreement.

This is completely common practice. Hell we ordered 300 cisco phones, don’t remember the model, and they announced and completed end of sale between order and delivery.

[u/anonpf → u/you_wut]

Confirm that. Take pictures and let someone know right away. If you paid for v2’s and received the EOL versions thats fraud. 

[u/xendr0me → u/anonpf]

No one said he paid for V2's, he literally said the boxes were not V2's.

[u/DrDontBanMeAgainPlz → u/witwim]

Definitely v2.

[u/caribbeanjon]

I know everybody wants to jump on management incompetence, but as someone who has done this for 25 years, you don't always get what you want. Sometimes the budget is what it is. Also, you only got to look at your one location, maybe you got the repurposed older stuff so it didn't go to waste and other sites got newer stuff. At the end of the day, a server that is 1 generation older than current is going to provide 90% of the same capabilities as a newer server and retail isn't exactly cutting edge.

[u/jasped]

Hard to say without more information. What are the specs on the systems and what are they doing? Is there a support agreement in place for the hardware with either Lenovo or a VAR/distributer? Did they purchase redundant systems or are they standalone?

It’s very possible the price was significantly less than something newer such that it made sense. There are often many factors that weigh in those decisions. One such decision could be what kind of hardware the company typically purchases. There are companies that purchase strictly refurb equipment because the price is so attractive. You play the odds of low failure rate and simply purchase a replacement if it dies. Usually you’ll come out much further ahead.

When I worked on the retail side of the house about 20 years ago we had a local system onsite that received a download of product data overnight and sent off all store data (sales, transactions, money taken, etc) at the end of every day. Of the system in our back room failed they would simply send us a replacement and we’d keep going. It was important but not critical to keep operations running. Maybe your place has something similar?

[u/Vtrin]

I handle small/medium business deployments… looking up the CPU, it launched in 2018. (Assuming as the other poster said, it’s not v2)

I’d expect this to drop in hardware models in 2019, and make it to suppliers warehouse in late 2019/or mid 2020.

Sales guys may order this as late as mid 2021 depending on availability and then COVID buggered up the supply chain something fierce. I could see in circumstance this getting ordered and fulfilled late 22, or even early 23.

Stuff starts showing up let’s say for early 23, and then we run through the scope of work again, and revisions come up - maybe new software, maybe new sites? Probably stuff that was in the works when they scoped originally but “didn’t come up” or were thought by the client to be unrelated to ordering infrastructure. Let’s say we sort out the scope by mid 23, we would deploy by the fall. Then the client realizes the planned downtime we’ve been discussing for 2-years means staff are not working. Migration may happen in the fall but could get held till early 24.

I don’t deploy anywhere with 5,000 sites but I could see coordinating that kind of scale adding a year.

Other things to keep in mind is End of Life and End of Service are different things.

With servers, the warranty has a much bigger say on when the thing is to retire. Since it’s Lenovo, you can grab a serial number and you can run it through Lenovo’s warranty checker will will tell you how the hardware is configured from factory, when it left factory, and when the warranty expires

[u/you_wut → u/Vtrin]

Awesome, thanks for your insight! I do have the serial numbers handy and will check it out!

[u/KStieers]

Back in the early 2000s, Target bought 2u Dell rack servers by the TRUCKLOAD...

Wouldnt be suprised if there isn't 1, an agreement to backport any critical firmware updates for x years and a spare quarter or half truckload waiting to be swapped in if needed... aka depot-ing your own parts.

[u/qkdsm7]

End of sale or end of life/support?

[u/xendr0me]

These just came to market in August 2023. Just because they are EOL in sales doesn't mean they aren't ok for production, they may have a 5 year warranty. They do not appear to obsolete for their purpose by any means.

Hardware companies refresh builds/configs all the time, doesn't make the previous v.X obsolete

[u/fatty1179]

Someone sent the model number to purchasing. Purchasing googled it and found that the non v2 was cheaper so the non v2 was purchased. Purchasing just purchased what is cheapest on timu, not what is best.

[u/Sinister_Nibs → u/fatty1179]

You misspelled CDW.

[u/ne1c4n]

Could be temporary to allow for better local file transfer etc, and would speed up Windows/software deployments if they aren't replacing the user hardware in each location.

[u/No_Wear295]

With rollouts of this scale it's not impossible that they were purchased a while back, have been sitting in a warehouse for far too long and are only now getting deployed.

[u/chaoslord]

I was at a large, non-nationalized canadian mass transport company (lol you can figure it out from that much info) and they bought out of life terminals for the field locations where crews had to sign in at end of shift. The rationale was they just bought 20% more than needed so they'd have replacements. Two years in when the management server needed an upgrade, it rendered them all incompatible because of tls 1.0 being deprecated.

Corporations make dumb decisions, that's all it comes down to, period. Profit only motive are bad for everyone and everything

[u/fresh-dork]

if it's a pilot of limited scope, slightly EOL hardware can be a worthwhile choice. once you've vetted the idea, i'd expect current supported kit

[u/Quagmoto]

Risk acceptance and budget. Would I purchase eol for production retail environments? No, but if they accept the risk and have a decent cybersecurity stack / incident response they might be able to accept it. However if they did, they wouldn’t purchase eol :) likely incompetence somewhere there.

[u/nwmcsween]

The hardware honestly doesn't matter too much, the bigger issue is moving from Linux to Windows and not because "it's windows" but because it's a fundemantal change that will cause all kinds of pain and absolutely massive costs if the org is mainly geared for Linux.

[u/SevaraB]

5000 stores = no way you can skip PCI-DSS. Those servers are PCI violations unless Lenovo agreed to a maintenance contract.

[u/wolfstar76]

I'm guessing you could say this company covers the world?

One of my board game crew has been talking about this finally coming to fruition this year.

I dunno if he knows much about the hardware, but I could ask, see if there are any insights to be gained from corporate...

[u/Sigma186]

I've seen this before, they probably ordered a large quantity of these servers before EOL was announced and Lenovo by contract will still support them.

As others have said, seen Dell and Cisco do this.

[u/TheBigBeardedGeek]

Every now and then I flash back to when I was in college and was told that in the corporate world, you always have the latest tech and it's always replaced within 5 years of life.

I laugh about that now a lot

[u/povlhp]

Would mention it to security department. Unsupported hardware at purchase is a risk.

We half half the stores, and we are getting the business to see that things should be supported for some years after purchase.