{"id":899,"date":"2009-08-24T05:26:15","date_gmt":"2009-08-23T19:26:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nsrd.wordpress.com\/?p=899"},"modified":"2018-12-12T15:48:42","modified_gmt":"2018-12-12T05:48:42","slug":"what-does-supported-mean","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/2009\/08\/24\/what-does-supported-mean\/","title":{"rendered":"What does supported mean?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s easy to get confused on &#8216;supported&#8217;. That is, when EMC (or any other vendor) publishes a guide on say, what operating systems are supported, many will ask whether that means if some operating system X that <em>does not<\/em> appear in the list will work.<\/p>\n<p>The terms &#8216;work&#8217; and &#8216;supported&#8217; are <strong>not<\/strong> synonymous, and should not be confused.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll be the first to point out that I routinely use CentOS in my lab \u2013 a Linux distribution that is most definitely <em>not<\/em> on the supported operating systems list. It&#8217;s a repackaged RedHat Enterprise Server, and I can install it as many times as I want at zero cost. On the other hand, if I needed to actually buy a RedHat Enterprise Server license for every Linux test VM, I&#8217;d be very, very poor.<\/p>\n<p>So clearly, CentOS <em>works<\/em> with NetWorker, even though it&#8217;s not supported.<\/p>\n<p>Would I recommend it being used at a customer site in a full production environment? <em>Not without rigorous caveats.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>You see, backup is one of those fundamentally low-level scenarios where taking risks is just plain wrong. It&#8217;s like the difference between <em>leading edge<\/em> and <em>bleeding edge<\/em>. There&#8217;s nothing wrong with being leading edge in the backup environment; many companies depend on being leading edge so they can meet their backup and recovery windows. Bleeding edge though \u2013 going out and using untested or uncertified configurations, just asks for trouble. Indeed, the term says it all \u2013 <em>bleeding<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>There are typically two key reasons why something may &#8216;work&#8217; but be &#8216;unsupported&#8217;. These are:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The vendor has not had a chance to test that particular configuration. I.e., it&#8217;s <em>unqualified<\/em>. For example, a Widgets Inc. Tape Library with LTO-5 drives and four robot heads may just not have made it to the vendor labs for qualification; so, while it may technically work, it&#8217;s never been tested.<\/li>\n<li>The vendor is not comfortable with the supplier support for the product.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Now, in the case of a solution or a configuration option being <em>unqualified<\/em>, there&#8217;s a solution. EMC for instance will work with customers and partners to determine whether a particular configuration can be qualified \u2013 indeed, most vendors have a similar process. While everyone would undoubtedly prefer that they get all the qualification done in their labs, we must also accept that it&#8217;s practically impossible to achieve, so some level of on-site qualification must be accepted as required from time to time.<\/p>\n<p>In the second instance though, things are a little more difficult. If a vendor isn&#8217;t comfortable that the supplier of a product will be able to suitably support that product at an enterprise level, then getting it qualified is unlikely at best.<\/p>\n<p>In these instances, if you want to deploy unsupported components in your system, ask yourself these questions:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Is there a supported option available?<\/li>\n<li>What are the pros and cons of the supported option vs the unsupported option?<\/li>\n<li>What is the <em>risk<\/em> to the business if the unsupported option has issues and the vendor refuses to support it?<\/li>\n<li>If the unsupported option is chosen, can a test lab be setup using the supported option so as to prove, at any point, that the use of the unsupported product does not contribute to an issue?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>The last point may seem a little odd &#8211; after all, if you can afford the supported option for a lab, why wouldn&#8217;t you deploy in production? I&#8217;ve actually seen this scenario with CentOS &#8211; a company couldn&#8217;t afford RedHat Enterprise Server licenses for all their production machines, so they deployed CentOS, <em>but<\/em> they also did buy a RedHat Enterprise Server license for a lab machine. Whenever an issue occurred that required escalation to the vendor, they&#8217;d first reproduce it on the RedHat Enterprise Server. That way, when it went to the vendor, they could (rightly) claim an issue on a supported operating system.<\/p>\n<p>Even so, this isn&#8217;t necessarily ideal. What was obviously not accounted for here was the potential for a high severity issue occurring. E.g., if a severity-1 fault occurred on a system, where data recovery was imperative, but <em>recreating the configuration<\/em> would take a long period of time, the risk remained that either (a) an escalation based on an unsupported operating system would be rejected or (b) the SLAs might be blown out of the water recreating the issue on a supported platform in order to get a successful escalation.<\/p>\n<p>In short &#8211; the decision to use unsupported software\/hardware is <em>not<\/em> the decision of IT staff. It <em>must<\/em> be the decision of senior management. It must be signed off, and stakeholders of affected systems and processes <em>must<\/em> be aware of the potential consequences.<\/p>\n<p>While <em>unsupported<\/em> does not necessarily imply <em>doesn&#8217;t work<\/em>, it&#8217;s important to remember that <em>unsupported<\/em> can most definitely mean <em>unsupported when it <\/em><strong>stops<\/strong><em> working.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s easy to get confused on &#8216;supported&#8217;. That is, when EMC (or any other vendor) publishes a guide on say,&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[16,23],"tags":[774,959,1112],"class_list":["post-899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-networker","category-support","tag-qualified","tag-supported","tag-work"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pKpIN-ev","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=899"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/899\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7623,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/899\/revisions\/7623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}