Product cycle for HP Bladesystem C7000 enclosure and BL460c Gen8 blade

[ylteric]

Dear Sir,

My company was interested in purchasing the HP Bladesystem C7000 enclosure together with some HP BL460c Gen8 blade.

However, we're quite concerned about the product life cycle of these hardware equipment if we purchased them right now.

We'll need to project/forecast the time span these equipments can last before any new hardware upgrade.

So, could you kindly provide us with some product information so that we can decide accordingly?

1) When are the HP Bladesystem C7000 enclosure and BL460c Gen8 blade first introduced to market?

2) What are the Obsolescence Date and End Of Support Date for the C7000 enclosure and BL460c Gen8 blade?

3) What are the estimated time the enclosure and blade will go end of support?

4) Any product cycle informations, eg. Obsolescence Date and End Of Support Date, for the predecessor models of the enclosure and blade?

Moved from ProLiant Servers (ML,DL,SL) to HP BladeSystem

[SwisspostIT]

Hello,

where right know also purchasing new C7000 enclosures and we had to get this information too.

What I can say by today:

 - The last Generation of C7000 Enclosures (50701X-XXX) will be End of SALES at the end of this summer (planned)

 - However the support of this product will be at least plus five years, so that the support will be guaranteed at least until summer 2018

 - The new Generation of C7000 Enclosures (68184X-XXX) came on market this february (2013) I think. The End of sales date I don't know but I think they will be at least the next 10 years supported...

For each server product the support is normaly from the end of sales date plus 5 years.

So the BL460c Gen8 will be at least 5-6 years in normal support lifecycle from today on.

PS: I cannot guarantee you this information but thats what we got from our HP representatives as information.

Regards,

Ville

[Casper42]

I would say everything in Ville's post is accurate.

The new (Platinum) and old (RoHS) enclosures are fully backward and forward compatible as well.
The only thing the Platinum can do that the RoHS cannot is 54Gb FDR Infiniband and 16Gb Fibre Channel when it arrives. All other Interconnect modules will work on both.

The official statement around the c7000 is HP guarantees availability for sale through the end of 2016. But I am confident that date will be pushed out since its already 2013 and there is no replacement yet. c7000 is the number 1 Blade platform on the planet, so they cannot just replace it quickly without expecting major push back from existing customers.


The BL460c Gen8 was introduced slightly over a year ago. March 2012. There will be a CPU Refresh around Sept when Intel releases Ivy Bridge CPUs but that will not change the 460 itself, just the CPUs get faster and more cores according to what I have read online.
No information on G9 is available yet, but it would likely coincide with Intel's "Haswell" CPUs and those are not expected till around the end of 2014.
So I would expect the 460 Gen8 can be purchased till at least 3 months after G9 comes out, which would be very end of 2014 or early 2015.

Hope that helps.

[Server-Support]

With the latest release of HPE Composable servers, does it have any exact end date now for the C7000 series ?