IBM Chops Maintenance on a Whole Bunch of Old Stuff

Published: June 21, 2010

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

At some point in every piece of hardware's life, enough is enough. It long since might not have made any economic sense to keep a piece of gear in use, but it worked and a vendor was willing to support, so even if it probably was expensive to buy the support contract, the vendor made out like a bandit and customers could avoid change and risk, which has its own economic benefits.

Eventually, even the vendor can't make money offering support. There are just too few customers and it takes too much time to scrounge for parts and train someone to maintain some obsolete piece of technology. And so it is with a whole slew of products that are under maintenance support from IBM, including a wide variety of older non-IBM gear that Global Services was perfectly willing all these years to babysit for a fee.

If you have some old kit in your shop under IBM maintenance, you might want to take five minutes and scroll down through this huge list of products in announcement letter 910-123 from last week. The only interesting part of the list as far as this newsletter is concerned is that IBM is warning customers with the old 9402 and 9404 2XX boxes and 9404 and 9406 3XX boxes (from the early 1990s) that they are going to get the maintenance plug pulled on them in December 2011. This includes the Advanced 36 server running SSP, too, which was known by the model 9402-236 designation. That gives you a year and a half to get off this ancient iron. If you have early Netfinity and xSeries servers, you might want to take a hard look at the list as well.

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