Re: "Pretty" announcement for End Of Support for Power 9.

Hello Rob,

sorry, can't resist…


Am 04.02.2025 um 18:22 schrieb Rob Berendt <robertowenberendt@xxxxxxxxx>:

Many people are under the belief that EOS is simply a scare tactic to get customers to buy new hardware.

I'm one of those. Although I'm aware that there can be exceptions. Most often it's just arbitrarily declaring EOS to generate new opportunities to sell new things.

1 - Service is based on parts availability. Oh, you lost hard drive model xyz? Sorry, we no longer have that in stock.

Uhm. I presume, SSDs and NVMes are the same for Power 9 and 10?

Same goes e. g. for PSUs. When a vendor constantly changes mechanical attributes for his PSUs for slightly newer hardware, it smells. Dunno if this is the case for Power6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

2 - New CVEs about security vulnerability will not be addressed. Normally these are fixed with Firmware updates. While one might think they'd all be discovered by now (again thinking it means whatever they want it to mean) there has been recent updates in the firmware for just such things.

Software always has bugs, it's simple statistics. IBM surely is able to fix security holes in central places, and have their shiny Ansible workflow build firmware blobs for Power 9 and 10.

But this very topic is a the heart of "scare tactics". Why declare perfectly working hardware being obsolete in the first place? Because only selling new stuff generates revenue! Why declare OS releases EOL? Because backporting fixes is costly. OK, granted. But then, why does the current release not run on older hardware? Because IBM wants it to be this way! Forcing customers to upgrade on many fronts is the way to generate revenue.

And the heap of electronic waste is becoming bigger and bigger…

3 - Service is based on availability of skilled resources. Sorry, we no longer have anyone in your branch trained on that old model, but thanks for the maintenance check anyway.

You seriously want to tell me that Power 9 and 10 machines are that much different so an average guy with a proper left and right hand, and a brain needs to be specifically trained to be able to replace the main planar for a Power10 when he's been trained to do this for other, largely same boring 19" hardware?

Power 9 = old model? See subject. We're not talking about someone required to fix a B30, or so!

4 - New issues are not covered. For example, some hardware in the industry goes totally berserk after x hundred hours of runtime unless you put on a certain patch. If they discover something like this, you're on your own. Such runtime issues are really out there and I'm not talking about some hidden gotcha feature some people put out there to ensure you're paying maintenance.

You're talking about one particular issue you encountered with certain SSDs, do you? How many other examples of such a rare occasion do you have?

And this is an excuse to replace an entire server?

Sorry, can't follow that argument.

:wq! PoC