Veritas NetBackup 5240 and 5330 Appliances After End of Support

Two quote requests arrived within a week of each other this month, one from a university in Saudi Arabia with a NetBackup 5240 appliance that is now past end of support, the other from a consultancy in Ghana responsible for a NetBackup 5330. Different continents, same situation: a backup appliance the vendor no longer supports, holding data the organisation cannot afford to lose, and no immediate budget for a replacement.

Backup appliances are the hardest equipment to let lapse. A production server past end of support is a risk. A backup appliance past end of support is a risk to every other system, because it is the recovery path for all of them.

The dates

Our catalog lists the Veritas NetBackup appliance end of service life dates as:

Appliance	End of service life
NetBackup 5020	21 May 2018
NetBackup 5220	14 August 2018
NetBackup 5330	30 August 2023
NetBackup 5240	31 October 2025
NetBackup 5340	31 October 2026
NetBackup 5350	31 December 2028

If you run a 5240 you are already past the date. If you run a 5340 you have until the end of October 2026 on the OEM contract.

What end of support actually removes

After the end of service life date Veritas stops selling hardware support for the appliance, stops shipping appliance firmware updates, and stops guaranteeing spare parts. The NetBackup software licence and its support are a separate matter, and many customers keep the software under maintenance while the appliance hardware ages out.

What does not stop is the hardware’s ability to run. A 5240 is server-class hardware with a large disk shelf. The failure modes are familiar: disks, power supplies, RAID controllers, DIMMs, the occasional backplane. Each of those is repairable with the right part and the right engineer, which is what third-party maintenance exists to provide.

Keeping the appliance supported

A third-party maintenance contract on a NetBackup appliance covers:

• 24x7 engineering support for hardware faults, including working alongside your NetBackup administrators or Veritas software support when a fault sits on the boundary.
• Spares for the appliance and its storage shelves, held ahead of need. Disk replacements in a backup appliance are routine and should never wait on a parts search.
• Onsite response at next business day or 4 hours.
• Coverage for 5+ years past end of service life, so you set the replacement date on your own terms.

Pricing is typically 40 to 70% below what the final OEM renewal cost, and for appliances already past the date the comparison is simply against the cost of being uncovered.

Use the time well

The reason to put a past-EOSL appliance under maintenance is not to run it forever. It is to turn an emergency into a project. With the hardware covered, you can plan the move to a newer appliance, to a software-defined NetBackup deployment on commodity servers, or to a different backup platform, on a budget cycle instead of after a failure.

If you have a NetBackup 5240, 5330 or 5340, send us the serial number, the site location and the response level you need. You will have an indicative price within 24 hours and a firm quote within 48, and the appliance will be covered before anything else goes wrong.