WebSphere Cast Iron Support Lifecycle

WebSphere DataPower Cast Iron Appliance XH40

IBM WebSphere DataPower Cast Iron continues to provide functionally rich technology to the market place through newer, more capable appliances. As older appliances mature, they will eventually be retired and no longer supported. IBM WebSphere DataPower Cast Iron wants to minimize the business impact of change to our customers so we have created the IBM WebSphere DataPower Cast Iron End of Service policy to assist our customers with your planning.

The IBM WebSphere DataPower Cast Iron Appliance End of Service policy will:

• Provide a minimum of five years hardware device product technical support, starting at the General Availability of the new product

• Publish a notice of support discontinuance (end of service) for a hardware product at least 12 months before the effective date

• May make support extensions available, for an additional fee after the service end of life date has been met and as inventory and capability is sustainable

The following table lists the planned dates that Remote Technical Support will be withdrawn for each Hardware Generation of the WebSphere DataPower Cast Iron Appliance product:
 

Hardware Appliance	Standard Maintenance End of Service Date	Extended Maintenance End of Service Date	End of Service Announcement Date
9235-8FX XH40	3/31/2016	3/31/2016 **	12/16/2014
7198-8FX XH40	12/31/2019	12/31/2019 **	07/28/2015

• ** no support extensions will be available

WebSphere Cast Iron Live

IBM WebSphere Cast Iron Live is a software-as-a-service(SaaS) offering. All customers are upgraded with the release of each latest version. Only the current version is supported.

WebSphere Cast Iron Hypervisor Edition and Software for WebSphere DataPower Cast Iron Appliance XH40

Our latest software releases introduce new feature and functionally rich technologies as well as cumulative maintenance fixes. Our goal is to provide you with quality software release upgrades that are easy to install. We recommend that our customers update to the latest releases in order to proactively avoid problems that are already resolved.

WebSphere DataPower Cast Iron will provide a minimum of two years of support for each software release beginning at the general availability (GA) of the release. WebSphere DataPower Cast Iron will continue to support the latest three levels of its software even if some of those software levels have aged more than two years. We will make these releases and their latest updates available from our Support Portal. Releases of the WebSphere DataPower Cast Iron software that are older than two years and are not within the three latest levels of software are subject to support withdrawal at any time. Customers will receive a twelve-month notice of this withdrawal for planning purposes.

Customers can use the table below to track how long their version and release of a particular software level will be supported. Using the information in this table, customers will be able to effectively plan their software investment without any gaps in support. Customers will receive twelve months notice prior to the end-of-service date.
 

Release	GA DATE	End of Service date
6.0.0	12/2010	04/30/2015
6.1.0	09/16/2011	09/30/2016
6.2.0*	06/15/2012	12/14/2012 (SaaS Only release)
6.3.0	12/14/2012	04/30/2018
6.4.0	06/28/2013	04/30/2018
7.0.0	11/15/2013	04/30/2020
7.5.0	07/31/2015

Notes:

At minimum, the three latest releases will be supported.

* Release 6.2.0 applies only to WebSphere Cast Iron Live Standard Edition.

WebSphere DataPower hopes this information is useful and assists our customers to effectively plan their technology investment.