New Platform Support Policy

by Mar 9, 2007

One topic that support frequently has to deal with is how soon will we support new platforms once they are released by their respective vendors. Ultimately, this is driven by a few factors: how different is the new platform from the previous one; what is the adoption rate of the new platform in production environments; and are customers demanding it.

To the first point, we support two streams of Linux (Red Hat, SUSE/SLES) and Solaris. We generally try to make available the monitoring station about 6 months after GA for these releases. This gives customers enough time to make the decision to deploy production applications on these environments and it gives us enough time to do the requisite platform QA (e.g. identify library issues, test new databases, do 32-bit vs. 64-bit testing, etc.).

In the Windows world, we are currently working on a Vista installer for up.time, however, it will be several months before a version is released. It's just painful working with the Windows Defender and Vista Security popups. The adoption rate for Vista is slowly picking up, of our web site traffic (which is 93% Windows platform browsers), only 1% of that was Vista two months ago, now it's 3%.

Alex