Hardware & Software End of Life Policy

• Appliance Product – Combined hardware and software products on the Riverbed^® price list that are not upgrades or components of other products. Examples of such combined hardware and software products are Steelhead^® appliances from Riverbed, Interceptor^® appliances, Central Management Console (CMC), Cascade Profiler, and Cascade Sensor.
• Cold Spares – Appliance products that are sold without any software license. Cold spares let customers keep on-site hardware replacement units that may be used only when a fully licensed equivalent appliance product fails, is no longer operational, and is disconnected from the network.
• Component Spares – Component spares include any component of an appliance product on the Riverbed price list (such as disks, memory, and NIC cards)
• End-of-Availability – The date a product is no longer available from Riverbed
• End-of-Support – The date a product is no longer supported by Riverbed.
• Hardware Upgrade – Products on the Riverbed price list that include hardware components that add functionality to an appliance product. Hardware upgrades include appliance product model upgrades that contain any hardware component.
• License Upgrade – Products on the Riverbed price list that add capacity or software functionality to an appliance product or software product through a license key without requiring additional hardware. License upgrades include appliance product model upgrades that do not contain any hardware components.
• Software Product – Stand-alone application software on the Riverbed price list that are not upgrades or components of other products. Examples of application software products are Riverbed Services Platform (RSP) or separately licensed software applications that can be installed on RSP or non-Riverbed hardware.

Notifications

Riverbed issues a notice generally 60-90 days before the End of Availability (“EOA”) date, which is the date that Riverbed removes a Product from our ordering system and price list. The notice includes critical milestone dates that will occur in the typical Riverbed end of life process, including the End of Life (“EOL”) date, meaning the date that a Product is no longer supported by Riverbed.

Riverbed Technology issues an end-of-availability notice generally 60-90 days before we remove an appliance product from our ordering system and price list. The end-of-availability notice includes an end-of-support date that is five years after the appliance product ceases to be available.

We will continue to offer maintenance and support services until the applicable end-of-support date on the appliance product as follows:

• Access to telephone, email, and website support for five years from the end-of-availability date
• Hardware defect repair and replacement services for five years from the end-of-availability date, including repair and/or replacement of component parts of the appliance product. We reserve the right to substitute functionally equivalent products and/or peripherals.
• Software maintenance (patches and bug fixes) on one or more major or minor releases that support the appliance product for a period of five years from the end-of-availability date
• Support for the full feature set of new major and minor releases made generally available for use on a product line associated with an end-of-availability product (such as new releases of RiOS^® that run on all Steelhead models) within two years of the end-of-availability date, except where precluded by hardware limitations.

The end-of-support date for an appliance product applies to all hardware upgrades, license upgrades, component spares, and cold spares associated with that appliance product. Supply permitting and at our discretion, we may continue to make available for purchase these hardware upgrades, license upgrades, component spares, and cold spares after the end-of-availability date of an appliance product as follows:

• Hardware Upgrades – For up to two years after the appliance products´ end-of-availability date
• License Upgrades – For up to four years after the appliance product´s end-of-availability date
• Component Spares – Supply permitting and at our discretion, after the announced end-of-availability date
• Cold Spares – Supply permitting and at our discretion, after the appliance product´s announced end-of-availability date

If we sell a hardware upgrade, license upgrade, component spare(s), or cold spare(s) for use with an appliance product after its announced end-of-availability date, that sale will not change the previously announced end-of-availability or end-of-support dates for that appliance product.

In addition, supply permitting and at our discretion, we may continue to make available for purchase refurbished appliance products and/or excess inventory of new appliance products after the end-of-availability date.

If we sell a refurbished or new appliance product after its end-of-availability date, that sale does not change our previously announced end-of-availability or end-of-support dates for that appliance product.

Riverbed Technology issues an end-of-availability notice generally 60-90 days before we remove a software product from our ordering system and price list. The end-of-availability notice includes an end-of-support date that is five years after the software product ceases to be available.

The end-of-availability date for software products is the date after which no new major or minor software releases will be made available.

We will continue to offer our maintenance and support services until the applicable end-of-support date on the software product as follows:

• Telephone, email, and website support for five years from the end-of-availability date
• Software maintenance (patches and bug fixes) on one or more major or minor releases that support the software product for five years from the end-of-availability date

The end-of-support date for a software product applies to license upgrades associated with that software product. At our discretion, we may continue to make available for purchase these license upgrades, for up to four years after the end-of-availability date of the appliance product.

Riverbed determines at our sole discretion the timing and content of any software release. Customers under current paid support subscriptions can obtain new versions of our software by downloading the updates  from Software & Documentation.

Our software releases are designated by the form X.Y.Z (where X, Y, and Z are integers) and are characterized as follows:

Riverbed’s standard practice is to provide software support and maintenance on the following releases:

• The current or latest major or minor release of the software.
• The immediately preceding major or minor release of the software, for a period of one year after general customer availability of the current or latest major or minor release.
• The latest valid major or minor release for any end-of-availability Appliance product or Software product that has not reached end-of-life.

At our discretion, we may provide support for older releases. If you encounter an error in a version of the software that is other than the latest release of any type, we may require you to upgrade to a specified later version to obtain a correction of the error.

We are continually evolving the products and services we offer. These innovations mean that we periodically transition away from selling or servicing certain hardware or software products.

This policy outlines how we handle support for hardware and software products that we have discontinued. As technology development drives changes, we may change our policy over time, so we encourage you to check this site regularly to get the latest information

If you have questions or would like more information, email us at support@riverbed.com or call +1.415.247.7381 (toll free in the United States and Canada: +1.888.782.3822).

View the list of Riverbed Hardware and Software End-of-Life Products