What Is EoL?

The acronym EoL stands for End of Life for a product. When a company announces an EoL date for a product it is telling the customers that they need to plan an exit strategy. This is especially true if the product is storing data. The good news is that you have some time to figure out whether you are going to upgrade to the OEM’s new product or go a different direction.

What Is EoSL?

End of Service Life or EoSL, is the date when the OEM will not offer any maintenance or support for the product. They gave you a heads up with the EoL announcement and time to figure it out with the EoSL date.At this point in time the OEM is saying if you run into product issues you are SooL (the socially correct definition is Simply out of Luck).

Exodus Problems

We see too many enterprise customers wait until weeks before the EOSL before trying to establish an exit plan and this can lead to a disaster. Think about the next statement for a minute. You spent 7 – 10 years writing data into your storage system and now you need it all removed in a few weeks. The first problem is that a migration is the most stressful thing that your storage system will ever go through, so this is when the probability of hardware failure is highest. The second problem is that this technology is old and it may not have the I/O or bandwidth to allow a high-speed migration. Typically, the closer the storage system is to full the slower the system operates.  This means the data ingest rate is not as fast as the data egress rate, so plan accordingly. The third problem is the Change Order process creates huge delay of game issues for any migration as most data owners are not prepared for the transition and will push back on schedules.

Make an Exit Plan

When an OEM issues the EoL notice this is when you need to create a project team to start the migration plan. They should be tasked with completing the project a minimum of 6 months before the EoSL date. Mr. Murphy can consume this buffer result in a disaster for the project and impact your career.   

Our areas of migration expertise:

Dell EMC Centera

Dell EMC ECS CAS

Dell EMC ECS S3

Hitachi HCP

Hitachi HANS

Hitachi HDI

Hitachi HCPG

IBM FileNet P8

IBM Content Manager

IBM Content Collector

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager