lifecycle of Blade Chassis

[jerry209]

Usually servers have 3-5 years lifecycle and then they won't get the hardware supports from vendor - no memory and other spareparts available any more.

I wonder how about Blade chassis - say, after 3-5 years, are they still have the supports from HP? and what we need to refresh is just the blades which have better CPU, memory etc, or the Ethernet or FC modules on the chassis? Or we also need to replace a new chassis? (sorry I don't know anything about the chassis before c3000 or c7000 families, are they being EOL?)

thanks

[Adrian Clint]

Jerry,

The c7000 chassis when released had a forecast end-of life (EOL) of 2012 at the very earliest, its now later than that. The EOL for support is usually 5 years from date of discontinuation. So if they discontinued it today then support would be available till Feb 2014.

Hardware spares should be available upto 3 years after discontinuation so for c-class that would be feb 2012 if discontinued tomorrow. But in the case of the p-class blades they ran out of stock so it was less than that .Because they underestimated demand for the old parts and the new c-class was so popular they could not stop making new parts to produce the old parts. Thats why there were a lot of upgrade deals... HP traded in old chassis for new blades to use as their own service spares I believe.

Server processor or interface option refreshes are separate to the chassis and even if the chassis is discontinued there may still be processor updates for the blades that go in it.
I would expect that when the c-class chassis is discontined then there will be no interconnect updates for it either. But its a few years away and it could depend on customer demand.

I think discontinuation of the c-class chasis is still far away.

[JKytsi]

Yep, and there is a lot of extra signal bandwith capasity for future interconnects/cpus etc .Also the power/cooling system can handle lot more than current servers can take.