Keeping up with what's dropped
September 24, 2007
Every HP 3000 site uses hardware which HP can drop from support. The vendor likes to call this act "obsoleting," but that's a matter of customer strategy. A product from HP, however, can fall from the company price list and still remain eligible for support.
When that support dies, though, the product is no longer in HP's 3000 ecosystem. Then it passes out into the wider landscape of the third parties. Companies need to know when this happens, whether migrating or homesteading.
Migration takes awhile, after all. Some customers are moving to open source solutions now, in preparation for moving off the HP 3000 in a few years.
Happily, HP has a Web page that keeps track of the hardware products it stopped supporting. This information is good to keep up with, especially if a site manager is replacing HP 3000 hardware with something else in the 3000 line. The newly arrived hardware might need a support contract, perhaps from the reseller who's delivering the product.
You will want to bookmark the HP main page for 3000 end of support dates. This Web resource should be a part of regularly scheduled HP 3000 management and strategy.
Less happily, the organization of HP's information could use a little help, in my opinion. HP's got separate links for each of its models of systems, all along the right-hand side of the page. I am not sure why each hardware family needs to have its own page. But on the plus side, the pages explain HP's arcane acronyms and states of support:
• Off CPL (Corporate Price List) date - date when HP stops selling a product.
• Actively sold products’ likely off CPL dates - projected date or timeframe that HP will stop selling a product.
• GMS (Guaranteed Minimum Support) date - minimum end-of-support date set at "off CPL" date by HP.
• Actively sold products’ proposed GMS dates - the likely GMS date to be set at the "off CPL" date.
• ECA (End-of-Contract Availability) - the HP Support community evaluates the GMS date within two years of its occurrence and for some products establishes an extended support period of time that ends with the ECA date. End-of-support should be considered the GMS date unless a later ECA date has been established.
Not much has changed on this hardware list for a long time. Well, since December of 2005 — getting on towards two years — when HP extended 3000 support, but pared it back to either Basic or "whatever you can negotiate in your area."