HPE BladeSystem Retirement

by Davoud Teimouri · 04/08/2022

I met HPE C7000 more than ten years ago for first time and I was newbie engineer in virtualization and datacenter. We had 6th generation of blade servers and the first virtual desktop infrastructure farm hosted by the servers in Iran and even Middle East. Now I didn’t find any official information about HPE Blade System retirement but after BL6xx server are retired and BL4xx servers released by some limitation compare to Synergy servers, it was clear.

On This Post:

Other Reasons!

There was no new Onboard Administrator firmware during past two years and also there was no new virtual connect firmware for Blade System during pas two years.

When Should We Replace?

Replacement was in progress during recent years and many companies migrate their composable infrastructure to other vendors products or HPE Synergy. If you are using HPE Blade System till now, you should consider that might be only server hardware received update for firmware and also until end of 10th generation life cycle.

Cisco UCS also is one of best composable infrastructure and you can use it for replacing your current HPE Bladed System.

Use Cases After Reqtirement

Actually, this is my personal idea about marketing in IT, vendors motivate you to change your hardware and software by offering new features and support on new solutions or new versions of current products. Also they are very consonant about that.

If you are using an enterprise software solution, the vendor motivate you to upgrade your hardware by announcing end of supporting current hardware solutions on new version.

You can use retired hardware in production environment by these conditions:

Hardware platform has support
Software solution supporting hardware platform

In case of any below conditions, be careful about bugs and security vulenerability:

Hardware platform doesn’t support by hardware vendor anymore
One of main hardware components such as BIOS or embedded remote hardware management doesn’t have support.
Software solution vendor (Actually OS vendors or virtualization platform vendor) stop releasing drivers for hardware components.

About HPE Blade System, I guess that we can keep it in production environment until one or two next years because 10th generation servers still receiving firmware and drivers. But may be, virtual connect and onboard administrator will facing with security vulnerabilities and bugs.

Concolusion

HPE Blade System was one of most popular composable hardware infrastructures during more than 15 years but there are some reasons that HPE has decided to stop selling and retire the hardware. You can still use the hardware in your production and also may be there is some way to get extended support for this hardware but you should consider about software solutions as well.

After announcing official retirement, you should accept any risk of using this hardware in your production environment. Now, you have to replace it with newer composable hardware infrastructure such as HPE Synergy or Cisco UCS and move HPE Blade System to other environment with less level of security risk or service availability risk.