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Blog topics regarding third party IT maintenance.

Facing Upcoming 2020 Cisco EOSL Deadlines

Many organizations have had to tighten their budgets to make it through the current recession and unexpected shutdowns. The OEMs like Cisco, however, haven’t changed their forced refresh cycle in light of companies’ inability to spend freely on their already expensive data centers. Whether you’re ready to invest again in new equipment for your infrastructure or not, 2020 Cisco EOSL deadlines are still fast approaching. Businesses don’t have to choose between a costly technology refresh or losing support for their EOSL devices. Cisco’s refresh schedule doesn’t have to be yours. Take back control of your data center. Option One for 2020 Cisco EOSL Hardware: Third-Party Maintenance Cisco dropping support for its EOSL hardware doesn’t mean you have to refresh your equipment or continue running critical workloads on unsupported hardware. The [...]

EMC Reaching EOSL in 2020

The OEM supply chain is significantly backed up, with some companies unable to provide dates for shipments. But that doesn’t mean the OEMs are pushing back their end-of-support-life (EOSL) deadlines. For those companies with EMC reaching EOSL in 2020, options are more limited than before. As it is, the OEM forced refresh cycle has companies looking for channel alternatives to prevent having to reinvest in new hardware when their current data centers are operating at full capacity with critical workloads. But with EMC unable to deliver new hardware when companies need it to prevent paying high support costs on sunset equipment and companies feeling the pinch of the current recession, reinvesting isn’t an option for many. EMC EOSL Upcoming Deadlines MODEL EOSL DATE Data Domain DD160 6/30/2020 Isilon S200 6/30/2020 [...]

JUNIPER Announcing End-of-Support (EOS) For SRX240H2 and SRX650

Juniper announced the end of Next Day Support for SRX240H2 and SRX650 on May 1, 2020−soon to be followed by End-of-Support (EOS) for SRX240H2 and SRX650 in the fall of 2020. With OEM supply lines dried up during the current crisis, companies are unable to refresh their critical Juniper equipment before support is lost. However, while OEM lead times are so far out that many don’t even have shipment dates, companies aren’t out of options. With the OEMs still maintaining EOS dates announced before the current pandemic and subsequent economic slowdown, companies still have to scramble to find a solution for their Juniper hardware, even with OEMs unable to provide a timeline for the arrival of new equipment. Organizations can’t afford to drop support, so what are their options? Option [...]

Preparing for IBM Going EOSL in 2020

You have critical instances running on your IBM servers and crucial data in your IBM storage—but have you been keeping up to date with the deadlines for your IBM hardware going EOSL in 2020? When juggling a multitude of vendors on top of driving strategic initiatives, IT managers have little time left to track contracts, contacts, and support deadlines. Unfortunately, the OEMs often announce end-of-life (EOL) and end-of-service-life (EOSL) before companies are ready to update the hardware they’d already heavily invested in and currently rely on. Don’t let the EOSL deadlines sneak up on you. See your options for IBM going EOSL in 2020. Option One: Buy Brand New Hardware from the OEM to Replace Your IBM Going EOSL in 2020 Of course, you could always let the OEM continue [...]

New Year, New IT Budget—Spend Wisely

A new year means a new IT budget. You could spend time that you don’t have re-structuring your operations, tweaking your networks, cost-cutting infrastructure, and generally cutting corners—all for small percentage savings with no real guarantee. There’s lower-hanging fruit for cost-optimization. Rather than expend exorbitant time and effort, you could take more logical and efficient measures that don’t deplete your in-house resources and allow you to see more immediate results. Here's how to start the year off on the right foot and get some quick wins. Make Immediate Room in Your IT Budget Consider the following alternatives to how you currently leverage and maintain your virtual and physical infrastructure. Third-Party Maintenance OEM hardware support increases significantly in cost after EOL is announced. And this seeming monopoly often pressures you to [...]

New Year’s Resolution: Consolidate Vendors

This New Year’s, make a resolution to reduce overhead, simplify logistics, and optimize your workflow: Consolidate vendors. Relying on a multitude of vendors is counterintuitive to efficiency in processes, communication, OPEX, and site-to-site standardization. Not only might you have separate vendors for various aspects of your operations, you might even have five, ten, or more vendors to support your different lines of hardware. With that many vendors to manage, your lean IT team might not know who to contact when your servers start to fail or even when your contracts are due for renewal. Resolve to Stop Falling Behind Without knowing your maintenance contact renewal dates—or vendor contacts—it’s almost impossible to know whether your support has lapsed. Meaning, if your hardware starts failing, your OEM could charge you exorbitant fees to [...]

FixIT: Dell System Fails to Power on After Power Supply Replacement

When any maintenance issues arise in your data center, the CentricsIT FixIT experts are here to help. With this rare and unexpected Dell server issue, CentricsIT walks you through how to fix your Dell system when you've replaced a failed power supply with a known new/good one of the same part number, but your Dell system fails to power on. You know your power supply is good, and all power supply lights are green. So, your Dell system not powering on doesn’t make any sense. You know the issue doesn’t lie in the hardware you just replaced, so you need to turn to another avenue to find the solution. The Problem Causing Your Dell System to Fail to Power On? Firmware This issue does not occur often. But, when it [...]

CentricsIT Profiled in Gartner Market Guide for Third-Party Maintenance

ATLANTA, September 9, 2019—Leading IT research firm Gartner has released its official market guide for Data Center and Network Third-Party Hardware Maintenance featuring CentricsIT as a representative vendor. Gartner releases report titled, “Market Guide for Data Center and Network Third-Party Hardware Maintenance,” compiled by Rob Schafer, Christine Tenneson, Mike Toussaint, and Daniel Bowers. This report was published on August 29, 2019. Readers must be a Gartner subscriber to access the full report (Gartner ID: G00414695). Gartner released its Market Guide for Data Center and Network Third-Party Hardware Maintenance in August 2019. CentricsIT is among the TPM providers listed as representative vendors.  The Atlanta-based company is profiled among other vendors, and the guide lists key findings to help IT leaders identify the benefits of third-party hardware maintenance. CentricsIT leadership supports the [...]

Preparing for IBM Power7 Going End-of-Service-Life (EOSL)

Perhaps you were fully expecting the End-of-Service-Life (EOSL) announcement for your POWER6 units; you bought them back in 2007, so it makes sense that IBM would already be starting the process of sunsetting them. What you might not have been expecting was the EOSL announcement to include your 8202-E4C POWER7s when these servers still work well in your environments. So, what are your options? 1.     Upgrade and Replace IBM Power7 Going EOSL: The IBM POWER9 IBM made its POWER6 and POWER7 announcements in preparation for a new generation of systems based on IBM’s Nimbus and Cumulus POWER9 chips. Fundamentally, POWER9 was built for data-intensive workloads with its optimized silicon, I/O subsystem technology, NVIDIA NVLink accelerators, PCIe Gen4, and OpenCAPI standards. POWER9 promises to accelerate bandwidth and compute options as well [...]

Third-Party Maintenance for IBM Netezza Reaching EOS

IBM is Pushing Early-Gen Netezza Users to Refresh—Know Your Options IBM recently announced the End-of-Support (EOS) date for the first three generations of Netezza products as June 30th, 2019. With this announcement, organizations using Skimmer (version N100-1), TwinFin (all N1001 versions), and Striper (all N2001 versions) are being pushed to begin the refresh process for hardware that still provides value. But companies have more options than spending massive amounts of CAPEX to refresh their data storage and analytics environments. IBM’s latest announcement is indicative of the typical OEM philosophy to force companies into a refresh, even organizations that aren’t ready to make the transition. With mission critical systems and complicated legacy applications still running on IBM Netezza EOS hardware, companies are now faced with an expedited refresh or loss of [...]