IBM has put out a Statement of Direction, reminding owners of POWER8 servers about the impending closure of the component upgrade window for these popular business servers.
Beginning in January 2022, IBM will stop marketing the upgrades for POWER8, before the effective date of withdrawal post which customers will not be able to order upgrades for components covered under Miscellaneous Equipment Specification (MES) such as memory, adapters, and internal storage.
POWER8 debuted in 2014, and IBM sold the last of the servers in 2019, having replaced them first with POWER9 in December 2017, and then POWER10 in September 2021.
According to The Register, IBM operates a product lifecycle it calls "N minus 2" whereby the company supports two generations of product at any one time.
End of the line
An IBM spokesperson told The Register that the Statement of Direction is its way of “alerting clients that the component upgrade window is closing soon.”
"While we have not yet externalized a specific date that the upgrades will no longer be available, it is typically 90 days from when we announce the actual withdrawal," clarified the spokesperson.
Going by this, back of the envelope calculation suggests that POWER8 users will not be able to procure MES upgrades for their existing servers sometime around April 2022. But IBM says it reserves the right to change the
Sure users can bank on the healthy third-party and second-hand components ecosystem for upgrades and replacements, though of course using these components would void the IBM support contract for the servers.
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