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. You can read about how these two new models differ from their predecessors in the following blog post: New Firewall Hardware: Sophos XG 86(w) and XG 106(w)
The XG 85(w) and XG 105(w) firewall models will be removed from the product range by August 17, 2019, at the latest. Sophos wants to get rid of the remaining stock as quickly as possible, which is why we are offering these models at heavily reduced prices in our shop.
Why you should give this special offer a wide berth, I will explain in this post.
Restricted License Renewals
Sophos officially states on 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 removed from the product range on June 15, 2019. The End-of-Life date is stated as August 17, 2022.
This means that anyone who owns one of these two devices or buys it new due to the promotional price can only use its full range of functions for a little more than three years. After that, this device is unusable, or rather, can only be operated with the Base License.
For those for whom three years are completely sufficient and who will buy a new firewall anyway afterwards, the next point, regarding the low performance of the devices, could be decisive.
Insufficient Performance
Let’s ask ourselves why Sophos is removing these two smallest devices from the market. Comparing them to the successor products, it is clear that only more RAM has been installed and the eMMC storage of the XG 86(w) has been expanded from 8 GB to 16 GB. So it’s a small performance update, nothing more and nothing less.
Why do the two smallest XG models get a performance update, and not the SG 105(w)? We could maliciously laugh again and claim that the SG series will soon be End of Sale anyway. 🤣
From our point of view, this step by Sophos is solely due to the SFOS operating system, which will probably require a bit more performance in the future, with the expected v18 at the end of the year. This would then not affect the SG hardware, and there would be no need for a quick hardware replacement.
Currently, there are rumors that v18 can no longer be operated on an XG 85(w) or XG 105(w). However, this is currently just a rumor and there is no official statement on this yet. Even if Sophos manages to get this to work with v18, one of the subsequent firmware versions at the latest will no longer be able to run on the hardware.
Trade-in Program
If it wasn’t already clear from this article, we would generally advise against supporting Sophos in clearing out old stock. If, after reading this article, you still want to secure one of the last XG 85(w) or XG 105(w) devices, you will certainly have your reasons. 😅
For anyone who has recently purchased one of these devices, Sophos will certainly offer a trade-in program in due course, where you can switch to the successor model for a small surcharge. Nothing is known about this yet. However, we will certainly inform you about it here on the blog as soon as we hear anything.
