IBM Power6 End of Support & Risk
IBM ended standard hardware maintenance for Power6 and Power6+ systems on March 31, 2019. Here's what that actually means if you're still running one.
IBM set an end-of-service (EOS) date of March 31, 2019 for Power6 and Power6+ hardware, per IBM announcement letter 917-163. Power7 and Power7+ machines got six additional months, through September 30, 2019. If you're running Power6 today, you have been operating without IBM's standard hardware maintenance contract available for more than seven years.
What "end of support" actually means
It does not mean the hardware stops working. IBM Power hardware is built for extremely long service life, and plenty of Power6 systems are still physically running. What ends is IBM's own maintenance contract: you can no longer buy or renew a standard IBM hardware maintenance agreement on this generation, which means no factory-sourced replacement parts through IBM's normal channel, no IBM field engineers dispatched under contract, and no IBM-issued firmware or microcode updates.
What actually breaks first
Power supplies, fans, and disk/storage components fail on a predictable curve. On hardware this old, the parts pool is shrinking, sourced from decommissioned units rather than IBM manufacturing. A system that's run reliably for a decade can still lose a component tomorrow, and the older the hardware, the longer a parts search can take when it does.
The operating system is a separate, earlier problem
IBM i releases that ran on Power6 (up through roughly IBM i 7.1) reached their own end of program support years before the hardware EOS date, meaning security and PTF support for the OS itself is a separate, earlier problem than the hardware question.
Compliance exposure
Running core business systems on hardware with no vendor-backed support path is a real finding in security and compliance reviews, independent of whether the hardware happens to be running fine today.
If replacement isn't happening this quarter, third-party maintenance is the practical bridge, see our maintenance page. If it's time to move, see our migration paths page for what actually changes at each generation hop forward.