End of Sale – Sophos XG 85(w) and XG 105(w)

In April of this year, Sophos introduced the new firewall models XG 86(w) and XG 106(w), which are now available without any problems. How the two new models differ from their predecessors can be read in the following blog post: New firewall hardware: Sophos XG 86(w) and XG 106(w)

Firewall models XG 85(w) and XG 105(w) will be discontinued no later than August 17, 2019. Sophos wants to get rid of the remaining stocks as quickly as possible, which is why we also offer the models at a greatly reduced price in our store.

But why you should give this special offer a wide berth, I explain in this post.

License renewals restricted

Sophos officially communicates via its website that a license for the XG 85(w) or XG 105(w) can be renewed for the last time on August 17, 2021. The 3-year licenses will be phased out on June 15, 2019. The end-of-life date is listed as August 17, 2022.

This means that anyone who owns one of these devices or buys a new one because of the promotional price will only be able to use the feature set for a little more than three years. After that, this device is unusable, respectively can only be operated with the Base license.

For those for whom three years is quite enough and who will buy a new firewall after that anyway, the next point, regarding the low performance of the devices, might be crucial.

Not enough power

Let’s ask ourselves why Sophos is taking these two smallest devices off the market. If you compare the XG 86(w) with its successors, you will only see that more RAM has been installed and the eMMC memory has been expanded from 8 GB to 16 GB. So it’s a small performance update, no more and no less.

So why are the two smallest XG models now getting a performance update and the SG 105(w) not? We could now laugh maliciously again and claim that the SG series will soon go End of Sale in total either way. 🤣

From our point of view, this step by Sophos has only to do with the SFOS operating system, which will probably require a bit more performance in the future, with regard to the expected v18 at the end of the year. This would not affect the SG hardware and there would be no need for a hardware replacement in a hurry.

Currently, it is rumored that the v18 can no longer be operated on an XG 85(w) or XG 105(w) at all. However, this is really just a rumor at the moment and there is no official statement about it yet. Even if Sophos still manages to do this with v18, one of the subsequent firmware versions at the latest will no longer be able to run on the hardware.

Trade-in program

In case it wasn’t clear in this article, we would generally advise against supporting Sophos in the clearance of old stock. If you still want to secure one of the last XG 85(w) or XG 105(w) devices after this article, you will certainly have your reasons for doing so. 😅

For those who have recently purchased one of these devices, Sophos will surely offer a trade-in program in due course, where you can switch to the successor model for a small additional charge. Nothing is currently known about this. But we’ll be sure to let you know here on the blog as soon as we hear anything.