immike
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Equallogic Firmware
I acquired a very old equallogic pre dell san. PS100. Is there a site to download the old firmware in the 3.x range? This unit is too old to have a service contract.
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Mark Recob
In four days my PS6000E that I bought direct from Dell five years ago goes end of life. My Dell inside sales guy told me today that he cannot sell me a service contract at this point for any price. I rather doubt they will sell anyone a service contract for a PS100 either. I had no idea they would cut me off after a paltry five years. I work in a small company with limited IT budget. We intend to keep working hardware like this until it dies. Dell makes a lot of noise about "scalability" but what does that mean when they sideline their own units after such a short time.
Five years is the new limit Dell put in for Equallogic units with SATA drives. They support SAS drives for seven years, I believe.
Scalability and support time frames are not related. Go ahead and run it until it dies. You can get drives, fans, and power supplies from other vendors. I had a fan go out on a power supply and we replaced it with an $8 part. The only this you can't get is firmware. If you really want a service contract there are companies that will sell that to you. The reality is that Dell is moving towards industry norms. You can't get service contracts for EMC or NetApp for equipment older than 3 years at a reasonable price, and at 5 years it is generally cheaper to replace.
Scalability and support time frames are not related. Go ahead and run it until it dies. You can get drives, fans, and power supplies from other vendors. I had a fan go out on a power supply and we replaced it with an $8 part. The only this you can't get is firmware. If you really want a service contract there are companies that will sell that to you. The reality is that Dell is moving towards industry norms. You can't get service contracts for EMC or NetApp for equipment older than 3 years at a reasonable price, and at 5 years it is generally cheaper to replace.
I will do as you suggest. My main concern is getting replacement drives. I know from experience that you can't just shove any old SATA drive in my PS6000E though I did just that for my old PS300E. I tried this once and the PS6000E rejected the drive. I suspect the newer units expect a proprietary Dell sata drive firmware. Fortunately I also have a PS4100E that I bought three years ago. It will allow me to get firmware for at least two more years maybe four if Dell does not count near-line SAS as sata for end of life purposes. I expect any number of the third party equallogic dealers will sell me the drives.
The correct answer is #38834032 - Firmware is not in the public domain and it doesn't matter whether or not author can't obtain ongoing support. The customer doesn't own the intellectual property he wants and the vendor has no obligation to make it available beyond End of life.