I recently discovered this avenue. It seems like Cisco builds most of their appliances on their standard UCS platform. For example, the WSA S680 appears to be a UCS-240 m3 under the hood with a E5-2680 v0 and 32GB of RAM.
What's interesting about this is these things go on ebay for nothing because they're such special use devices.
The question is can you simply install Linux? My guess is yes. The thought is if you took out the SD cards, and the drives you have a bare metal machine. It isn't like the Cisco OS is on the metal itself, it's just software on a drive. So in theory with any of these you can just wipe the drives and you have a cheap server.
Anyone else exploring this?
I have an order in for a Netflow aggregation device. It's a 220 m4 with dual e5-2660-v3 and 64GB of RAM, 2TB of disks and 2x dual 10Gbe NICs, brand new, $1k. Seems like a decent deal. I even found instructions online for how to re-install the netflow software, it's just on the bootable SD cards. So in this case it should be a reasonable server without the price tag.
Thoughts? Experiences?
What's interesting about this is these things go on ebay for nothing because they're such special use devices.
The question is can you simply install Linux? My guess is yes. The thought is if you took out the SD cards, and the drives you have a bare metal machine. It isn't like the Cisco OS is on the metal itself, it's just software on a drive. So in theory with any of these you can just wipe the drives and you have a cheap server.
Anyone else exploring this?
I have an order in for a Netflow aggregation device. It's a 220 m4 with dual e5-2660-v3 and 64GB of RAM, 2TB of disks and 2x dual 10Gbe NICs, brand new, $1k. Seems like a decent deal. I even found instructions online for how to re-install the netflow software, it's just on the bootable SD cards. So in this case it should be a reasonable server without the price tag.
Thoughts? Experiences?