First instinct when a vendor announces end of life support for a platform is to look at the latest technology offering with a natural assumption being that it will be faster, simpler and cheaper. The reality, however, is that often the current system is performing satisfactorily across all measures and moving off it will result in a lot of pain. What can you do?

There’s a sense of déjà vu with the recent announcement of the release of Cloud Pak for Data System (CP4DS) 1.0.7.8 (a.k.a Hammerhead). It has all the signs of a capitulation on the part of IBM to customers who want to continue with the idea of Netezza being a stand-alone appliance, and not have to share CPU resources with other components in a hyperconverged architecture.