As a general rule, third-party maintenance providers are not permitted to provide software patches or updates, as they are the manufacturer’s intellectual property. (There are a few notable exceptions in which we can legally acquire software, so consult your account executive if there’s a specific system or product line you’re curious about).
Since software updates are proprietary, third-party support may not make sense in all situations, particularly those in which compliance or internal policy dictates that you have ongoing access to the newest OS versions. However, most organizations choose TPM despite this limitation for the following reasons:
The OS is stable. By the time the initial manufacturer warranty expires, a storage, server, or networking platform is usually at least 4-5 years, meaning the OS has stabilized. This is because the vast majority of bugs are found and resolved within the first 2-3 years of a platform’s release (the same can arguably be said for any meaningful updates the OEM releases for a platform as well). This is why many customers upgrade once or twice a year in the first few years of ownership but slow that pace dramatically as the system gets older.
The customer is not adding any new applications. When it comes to shared storage, one software-related concern may be that you bring on an application that doesn’t play well with your semi-outdated OS iteration. This is an unlikely scenario in the first place, but most of our customers have a fairly static purpose for any storage that is 3+ years old, and they’re simply trying to extend its useful life by a few years.
Updates are available until your OEM support contract expires. As a customer, you can protect yourself to a certain extent by downloading any available patches or updates before going off OEM support, even if you choose to apply them later. For the most part, our customers who do this never choose to apply the update, but they see it as a precautionary best practice.
The OEM has moved on. The OEM overcharges for maintenance renewals because they want to push customers to refresh to the latest, more expensive generation prematurely. In many cases, the OEM has shifted its engineering focus away from the legacy platform you are using in favor of the new product line it wants you to buy. As a result, updates for legacy product lines are few and far between.
The cost savings are enormous. We understand there is usually some perceived level of risk associated with losing the ability to update software. However, ReluTech supports hundreds of customers and thousands of systems, and we have never encountered a situation in which a customer cannot operate a system because a software update was unavailable. We encourage our potential customers to compare our renewal prices to the OEM prices, consider how much risk is involved, and perform a basic risk-reward analysis to decide if TPM is the most efficient option. More often than not, we believe it is.