Bridge your upgrade to Enterprise Vault 12 with Extended Technical Support

[ShawnAquino]

It’s almost an oxymoron I’m a technology laggard, given I’m routinely called to introduce and market new product innovations in long-term information retention. Yes, I’m still running Windows 7 on my work laptop until I’m forced to upgrade. And yes, I refuse to create a Snapchat account, even though it’s probably a great tool to keep me in tune with what my busy daughters are up to every day. But as I write this brief blog encouraging our Veritas Enterprise Vault™ (EV) customers to upgrade to the latest and greatest release – version 12 – I do so with a grain of salt, understanding any number of reasons could be influencing an upgrade delay.

Maybe you’re transitioning workloads to the cloud and are questioning the role of Enterprise Vault, which by the way is still the leader in on-premises information archiving, according to analysts such as Gartner? To this point, I’d strongly recommend a healthy discussion with your Veritas sales team or authorized reseller. For some, a migration to Enterprise Vault.cloud could be a great solution, but others are actively considering running Enterprise Vault in Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure to help preserve their investment in EV licensing and skills or transitioning to a service like EV247 to support a desired shift from CAPEX to OPEX. Also, new classification features with Enterprise Vault 12 can help you clean out the archive, as well as help you determine the meaningful information to keep, prior to your cloud migration.

Or maybe you’re of the opinion “if it ain’t broke, why fix it”? To this point, I’ll say I respect that position, as I reluctantly confirm I still use Earthlink for personal email. But you have to understand no vendor can viably support a software release forever. Microsoft doesn’t. Apple doesn’t, and Veritas isn’t different in this regard. In late 2016, Veritas rolled out both a new global End of Life Policy to help simplify end-of-life milestones and set predictable standard support periods for all Veritas solutions and a new End of Life (Product) Table. In the immortal words of Geoffrey Chaucer, “all good things must come to an end”.

So, as you plan your upgrade to EV 12, pay particular attention to the dates for End of Standard Support (EOSS) and End of Support Life (EOSL) for your current release. In short, EOSL is the date after which no support of any kind is available for an EOL product, and EOSS is the last date Standard Support (full technical support, bug fixes and patches) is available for an EOL product. As of February 1, 2017, Enterprise Vault 9.x eclipsed its EOSL date, which means customers on this release will no longer be able to receive support of any kind. And both EV 10.x and 11.x have already passed their respective EOSS dates – this means bug fixes and patches are no longer available – but customers on these releases can still purchase Extended Technical Support for phone support only, as a bridge to upgrading to Enterprise Vault 12, until the respective EOSL dates.