topic Hardware End-of-Engineering in Firewall and Security Management

Hardware End-of-Engineering

tropicanaslim — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 17:08:53 GMT

Hi Checkmates,

Does anyone can explain term of "end-of-engineering support" means on this https://www.checkpoint.com/support-services/support-life-cycle-policy/ ?

Why Check Point has 2 years gap between EoL and EoEngineering support?

I mean for example if customer currently on R81.20 on 5600, after 2023 they cant get hotfix support or everything with GaiaOS support they wont? Thank you..

Re: Hardware End-of-Engineering

Chris_Atkinson — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 22:10:26 GMT

At the End of Engineering date no new major versions will be tested/supported for that HW moving forward.

So for access to new features and to run the latest software a hardware upgrade is needed.

Re: Hardware End-of-Engineering

the_rock — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 22:28:32 GMT

Its essentially fancy term for exactly what Chris said : - )

Re: Hardware End-of-Engineering

G_W_Albrecht — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 06:56:17 GMT

EoEngineering support means: No more Jumbos, no special HFs for this model, only best effort support until EoL. The 2 years gap facilitates the needed hardware change.

Re: Hardware End-of-Engineering

PhoneBoy — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 18:45:46 GMT

End of Engineering support means no new major versions of software for that hardware.
Existing versions at the time of End of Engineering support will still be supported until End of Life.
After End of Engineering support, fixes specific to that hardware will be limited and may require software and/or hardware upgrades.

To give a concrete example, the appliances we released in 2016 have an End of Engineering date of end of 2023.
At the very least, this means R81.20 (latest release at present) will be supported on these appliances until their End of Life.
R82 (next major release) may or may not be supported on the 2016 Appliances, depending on when it is released.