Posted on Friday, October 14, 2016 in Cloud Storage, Storage Hardware, Storage
In the past, we have talked extensively about support for end of service life (EoSL) equipment. After all, CDS specialize in delivering maintenance services for storage hardware long after the OEM has withdrawn official support.
But technology is changing and so is the way we talk about it. Because we firmly believe that the concept of ‘end of service life’ has significantly changed.
What are we talking about?
EoSL has always been an artificial construct, a way for mainstream vendors to protect unit sales at the expense of their customers. By withdrawing support for hardware, OEMs have been able to convince their users to replace perfectly serviceable equipment with shiny new units.
Typically these new units provide a performance boost (along with new features and fixes), but it comes at significant cost. Particularly when the existing system is probably still delivering value. Many customers have also stabilized their environment and continue to operate on older software versions, only applying security updates if required.
Software defined storage (SDS) is changing everything however. By abstracting the management layer from the physical hardware, issues like vendor support and software updates become a lot less important.
SDS storage is effectively a massive pool of storage disks that can be allocated and used however you require. The storage itself is completely commoditized, so the vendor is almost completely unimportant.
Post-warranty still matters
With storage commoditized, there is no longer any reason for your business to retire existing systems. Instead, they can be redeployed into a vendor-agnostic SDS infrastructure to provide additional capacity.
So although the major storage vendors may continue to talk about EoSL, it’s less of an issue for us – and our customers. They are now free to purchase enterprise-class storage regardless of EOSL or post-warranty. Additional value can be realised by choosing CDS to provide complete support and maintenance – in 50+ countries across the world.
Moving away from vendor-defined EoSL time limits will help your business contain costs and maximize return on hardware investment. And with the option of partnering with CDS to provide support for post-warranty hardware, operating costs can be further reduced without affecting service delivery.
To learn more about SDS and how CDS can help your business can beat the EoSL trap, please give us a call.