End Of Support Announced For IBM Power Middleware Releases

January 15, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Last year, Big Blue moved its current and archived announcement letters as well as its sales manuals and other systems such as PRPQ tracking from the ancient IBMLink system (which used to run on its own mainframes for the many decades that we have used it) to a new system called IBM Documentation. The latter of which may perhaps have a better look and feel, but which has a much more difficult way of trying to keep track of what IBM is doing on a weekly, monthly, and annual basis.

The new IBM Documentation system does not allow you to just scroll back into the past, week by week, to see the full expanse of Big Blue’s announcements, across all product. No, it shows you this week and last week and that is it. If you don’t keep up, you have to know what you are looking for to find it and serendipity – which is an important search retrieval technique – is lost.

As a consequence of this new system, we sometimes miss seeing things that IBM is doing that we might have otherwise seen. We are learning the new system and are working to find things so neither we nor you miss anything relating to Power Systems that is important.

With that, we consider announcement letter AD23-0857, IBM is giving customers using earlier versions of its selected middleware for Power Systems fair warning that this earlier code is going to be withdrawn from marketing and have its support removed. IBM often gives very advanced warning of such changes, and this is the case in this particular announcement.

And thus, we find that PowerVC Standard Edition 2.0.0, which is a release of Big Blue’s homegrown implementation of the OpenStack cloud controller that is tailored for Power Systems, will have its support discontinued on September 30, 2024, and PowerVC Standard Edition 2.1.0 will have its support cut off on April 30, 2026. As IBM announced last August, there is no Standard Edition with the 2.2 release of PowerVC, but rather just PowerVC for Private Cloud, which is a slightly different OpenStack bundle. There are free upgrades to PowerVC for Private Cloud 2.2 for customers using the earlier PowerVC Standard Edition releases, which is a good thing.

IBM is also announcing that PowerVM Standard Edition 3.1.X will have its support cut off on September 30, 2025, and the Watson ML Accelerator 1.2.X connector middleware will have its support terminated on September 30, 2024. The 2.0.0 release of the PowerSC security tool, and IBM VM Recovery Manager HA 1.5.0 and IBM VM Recovery Manager DR 1.5.0 all get support cut on April 30, 2025. IBM VM Recovery Manager HA 1.6.0 and IBM VM Recovery Manager DR 1.6.0 all get support cut a year later on April 30, 2026. There is a supported PowerSC 2.2.0 release as well as IBM VM Recovery Manager HA 1.7.0 and IBM VM Recovery Manager DR 1.7.0 that are currently supported.

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