Supporting legacy systems is not always considered to be a particularly important component of IT operations. That is because older systems are ignored and new infrastructure is used to support your applications and services. Even so, your legacy systems can be a great way to maximize your budget as they can meet the vital requirements of your data center. If you want to maximize the return on your hardware investment, find a data center hardware support plan that will not only prioritize your maintenance strategies but also focus on your legacy systems.

The IT service management company Gartner recently released a report detailing how third-party maintenance providers are best equipped to provide solutions that result in cost savings with optimum results. The report names a few key points that show third-party maintenance is a great way to save on your budget and free up resources to fund other initiatives or the business. Here are the main points as outlined by Gartner:

by Reid Smith-Vaniz, CEO, Reliant Technology

No one has any time, here’s how you can get back 100+ hours.

Hack #1: Kill the refresh project

The refresh project is a huge time-suck. Think about all the time it takes to plan, buy, install, migrate, decommission, sell the equipment associated with a refresh. From vendor meetings to negotiating, it can take 100’s of hours to complete one refresh.

1. How Do You Define Data Center Hardware Maintenance?

Maintenance is the foundation of risk mitigation in the technical business world. It would be very risky to implement any technology without an effective method to handle equipment failure. Any failure can impact the operational stability of a system. Most businesses expect systems to be operational with minimal downtime.

Business projects, technical projects and maintenance projects compete with the basic housekeeping and administration costs for every dollar in your budget. Warranty and technical support for your data center are those rare frustrating things that eat up budget but are not often used.

When a particular vendor schedules hardware for End of Service Life, it can be a difficult time for the customers who use those products on a daily basis. Not only do you have to worry about what that means for the future of your EMC or NetApp products, but you also have a variety of different dates to keep track of in your head. EOSL, EOL, EOS and EOA are all abbreviations that are incredibly important to know. Keeping track of exactly what these abbreviations mean will go a long way towards helping you make the right decisions moving forward. So what exactly is the difference between all these different terms?

EOSL

When Dell EMC, NetApp, HP, IBM, Cisco, Brocade, or any OEM announces that a piece of hardware will reach End of Life (EOL) or End of Service Life (EOSL), it can be difficult to understand what these milestones mean for your storage environment. Not only do you have to understand what each term means, you also have to figure out next steps for your EOL hardware. And after all that...

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