June 30, 2013 will mark the End-of-Life for ET/BWMGR v4.x and all previous versions.
What This Means to You
If you have an appliance running ET/BWMGR V4.X or v3.X, then this EOL may affect the timing of any plans to upgrade to v5, and it has significant implications should you have a hardware failure.
Why EOL
V4 has been unofficially retired as of September 2012. New v4 licenses were not available for sale, but support was available for upgrades and replacements for those still running v4.X.
After June 30, 2013, it will not be possible to upgrade a v4 license to a faster v4 license, replace a v4 license due to a hardware failure, or re-install the product using the ET/Recovery CD. v4.X licensing and registration requires a license and update server, which will be taken down as of the June 30 EOL date. After that date, you will need a complete, fully registered backup in order to recover from a failed hard drive.
What are your Options?
Your software will continue to work, as long as the hardware that it is licensed to operates, so you can keep your existing systems in operation. What you can't do is move the license to new hardware if you have a failure, or re-install the product from CD.
The safest long-term option is to upgrade to v5. However, you should plan for a small amount of down-time for the upgrade, as v5 requires a full installation from a USB image - it cannot be installed via the v4 Auto-Update module. In addition to the installation, most rulesets will require some migration, and can't be simply copied over to the new appliance. To minimize downtime, we offer a Migration Service to facilitate the v5 upgrade.
Upgrade Sooner than Later
Upgrading won't cost less in 6 months after you have some big failure, so there is no financial advantage in waiting to upgrade. If you plan to upgrade in the future, sooner is better than later. Upgrading to v5 with support will protect your investment by allowing for hardware replacements if you have an equipment failure or need to upgrade due to capacity, and of course it's better to plan for a small amount of downtime, rather than risking having no bandwidth management over a weekend if your V4 machine stops working on a Friday afternoon.
Why We're doing this now
v5 is a much better, more modern product, and it's cumbersome for us to support customers running versions of software that are sometimes as much as 8-10 years old. It's not cost effective for us to continue to support ancient hardware. We must be able to focus our efforts on the current and future products.