Digital assets typically need to be replaced approximately every 5 years as by then they are more prone to failure which reduces system reliability. This is an industry-accepted lifespan. We rely on our IT assets being maintained under a vendor support agreement that typically only provides coverage for 5 years.

Hunter Water currently has NetApp-branded data storage hardware that supports our production servers (Tier 1 storage type) and non-production servers (Tier 1 and Tier 2 storage types). Tier 1 provides the fastest operations as required for production servers. Tier 2 is not as fast but holds a larger amount of storage which is suitable for our other systems.

Production systems include SCADA, Velocity, Ellipse and TRIM.

Our initial 5 years of support for this data storage expired in April 2024 but we were able to request another year of support at a higher cost than the standard support agreement. We will be able to extend this for a further 6 months from April 2025 to October 2025 at a higher cost.

If we have any hardware failures (such as a hard drive) the vendor replaces it. The vendor also applies regular software, and firmware updates and supports any software integrations in connection with the NetApp hardware, such as VMware.

After October 2025, no further access to vendor support will be available and these data storage assets will be 18 months past their typical end of life. Being out of support means any failures will not be rectified as we are unable to log a support request with the vendor.

We will not have access to updates including security patching which will leave us vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Not being able to fix a component problem or replace hardware means Hunter Water may not be able to meet its Recovery Time / Recovery Point Objectives (RTO/RPO - the time it takes to restore normal operations following an outage or data loss).

A failure could occur in any part of our NetApp hardware environments or integrations. The impact could be minor, such as performance issues for a few users, or it could mean an outage of a core system like SCADA.

While it is possible to pay a third party to attempt to fix any failures after we are out of the vendor support period (or even potentially work on issues ourselves) we still do not have access to updates, patch fixes or even new hardware. Third-party providers also don't have experience with our systems or necessarily the quality required.