We're a Nortel elite partner and the people on the data side of the house were not informed (our liaison on the voice side is apparently more "on the ball") about this recent policy change. We found out when we called for support last Wednesday.
Nortel will only provide support on current code plus two revisions back. Anything prior to that is considered End-of-Life or EOL. Furthermore, two revisions back only gets you limited support (I've yet to get clarification on limited).
For Example, Passport 8000 series code:
Current Revision = 3.7.x.x
Last Revision = 3.5.x.x
Limited Support = 3.3.x.x
(4.0 is due out soon)
If you call in for support on EOL code, they won't even talk to you without a P.O./credit card number..AND..your network must be down. Once the network is back up - case closed. Cost is $300.00 per hour with a 2 hour minimum. That doesn't get you root cause analysis (looking at logs, configs, etc.) or anything beyond getting the network back up. If it crashes again 5 hours later...get out your credit card.
They tell me it has always been thus and they've just started to enforce it, but I know better. I asked for clarification on their policy in 2003 and still have the correspondence detailing same. They used to have a policy stating "prior to current code plus two revs back is EOL", but...they would handle EOL code calls the same. They just would not address bugs unless it could be proven that the bug exists in newer revs of code.
Anyway...time to inform your customer's or get your own networks up to snuff with respect to code. Otherwise you'll get next to nothing from Nortel.
Nortel will only provide support on current code plus two revisions back. Anything prior to that is considered End-of-Life or EOL. Furthermore, two revisions back only gets you limited support (I've yet to get clarification on limited).
For Example, Passport 8000 series code:
Current Revision = 3.7.x.x
Last Revision = 3.5.x.x
Limited Support = 3.3.x.x
(4.0 is due out soon)
If you call in for support on EOL code, they won't even talk to you without a P.O./credit card number..AND..your network must be down. Once the network is back up - case closed. Cost is $300.00 per hour with a 2 hour minimum. That doesn't get you root cause analysis (looking at logs, configs, etc.) or anything beyond getting the network back up. If it crashes again 5 hours later...get out your credit card.
They tell me it has always been thus and they've just started to enforce it, but I know better. I asked for clarification on their policy in 2003 and still have the correspondence detailing same. They used to have a policy stating "prior to current code plus two revs back is EOL", but...they would handle EOL code calls the same. They just would not address bugs unless it could be proven that the bug exists in newer revs of code.
Anyway...time to inform your customer's or get your own networks up to snuff with respect to code. Otherwise you'll get next to nothing from Nortel.