About Bushido
A free, independent knowledge service for IT operators, MSPs, and the engineers who keep older hardware honest. No sales rep, no upsell, no maintenance contract. The information is the product.
Tended by Master Bushido — the discipline of the operator, applied to the hardware everyone else forgets. Read her tale →
What Bushido does
Type a hardware vendor and model — Dell PowerEdge R740, HPE ProLiant DL380, Cisco Catalyst 9300, Synology DS920+, whatever you have on the floor — and Bushido returns a structured record covering:
- Lifecycle dates — released, GA, end of sale, end of support, end of service life
- Failure outlook — likelihood percentage by age, ordered list of components most likely to fail
- Indicative TPM pricing — annual and monthly across four SLA tiers (9×5 NBD, 24×7 NBD, 24×7×4 onsite, 24×7×4 remote)
- Security advisories — top CVEs from the National Vulnerability Database, with CISA KEV highlighting
- Platform & OS lifecycle — the end-of-life of the software that runs on the hardware, from endoflife.date
- Parts market — secondhand whole-unit pricing and common-part costs for the repair-vs-replace decision
- Modern replacements — direct successor and current-generation links to vendor announcements
- Power, rack, firmware, and BOM — physical specs, latest stable firmware, and the standard bill of materials at GA
Why it exists
The information about aging hardware is scattered across vendor portals, EOSL libraries, parts marketplaces, and security databases — and most of the tools that aggregate it are built to sell you a maintenance contract. Bushido is built the other way around. It does not sell hardware, parts, support, or contracts. There is no sales rep waiting for you to read the page. The data is the whole point.
It is built by people who run hardware estates, under the operational discipline of a production service — not a hobby site that will vanish next year. Every record carries a confidence score, every estimate is labeled as an estimate, and every disclaimer is plain-spoken. When we don't know, we say we don't know.
What you get
- Free, gated access — sign up with name, email, and company. Verify your email. Begin lookups.
- Honest synthesis — every answer is AI-synthesized from public sources, with confidence scoring you can read at a glance.
- No upsell wall — we are not a maintenance company. We do not sell hardware, parts, or support. We do not block the data behind a paywall.
- A continuing knowledge base — read The Path for long-form articles on lifecycle, storage, resilience, networks, defense, and the discipline of maintenance.
Honest disclaimers
- Bushido is an information service. It is not architectural advice, compliance counsel, or a substitute for vendor support.
- All data is AI-synthesized. Verify before acting.
- Indicative TPM pricing is not a quote.
- Manufacturer names and logos appear for identification purposes only. We are not affiliated with any of them.