HP published a facetious post yesterday to their Technical Support Services Blog. In it, they try to spin their decision to stop providing firmware updates to customers not under warranty and belittles those criticizing their decision. Besides the marketing speak, we learn that HP says this change will take effect February 19th, 2014. Despite the fact that I saw it blocking access on February 1st, what can be done in the meantime to prepare for the change in HP’s policy?
HP creates the HP Service Pack for ProLiant (SPP) and HP Smart Update Manager and updates it regularly. You can grab the latest SPP and supplements for your operating system to minimize the impact of this bait-and-switch by HP.
- HP Service Pack for ProLiant (SPP) info page
- HP Service Pack for ProLiant (SPP) and supplements download page
From the HP blog post:
This decision reinforces our goal to provide access to the latest HP firmware, which is valuable intellectual property, for our customers who have chosen to maximize and protect their IT investments. We know this is a change from how we’ve done business in the past; however, this aligns with industry best practices and is the right decision for our customers and partners.
…
At the end of the day, we want you to know that you can continue to count on HP.
At the end of the day, I and many others will no longer recommend HP servers to clients because of this policy change.