Beware the Undead IBM System: When End of Life Is Just the Beginning
14 May 2025 - 2 Minute Read
It began, as all good horror stories do, with a whisper...
“Your system’s at End of Life,” the TPM said.
“But don’t worry, we can keep it alive. MWA HA HA HA!”
And so, we believed them.
(The sinister laugh at the end of that sentence probably should’ve been a giveaway).
Our once-proud IBM system was “resurrected” under third-party care, alive, but not quite what it once was.
Like a pet from Pet Sematary, it came back… different.
At first, all seemed well. The lights blinked. The fans hummed. Users carried on as if nothing had changed.
Then one fateful night, we tried to apply an update…
Fix Central was closed off to the Frankenstein’s monster kept alive by parts dug up from who knows where.
Microcode was protected from the unnatural abomination.
OS updates were nowhere to be found - no access for the living dead!
That’s when we realised the terrible truth:
We had believed the lie of “End of Life”… and in doing so, we’d created a monster....when all we needed to do was accept the Change of Service Level.
Our TPM could service the hardware, yes, but IBM’s updates, patches, machine code and firmware were beyond their reach.
We were trapped in a living nightmare, haunted by the words “Access Denied.”
No updates.
No fixes.
No peace of mind.
Each night the team lay awake, listening to the hum of undead servers and the whisper of “Access Denied…” echoing through the data centre. They knew the outage was coming they just didn’t know when.
We needed holy water.
We needed garlic.
We needed someone brave enough to enter the server room at midnight.
We needed Baby 👻oo to banish the demons, lift the curse, and guide us back into the light of IBM Support.
And the final twist?
The exorcism cost less than we were paying the TPM!
So this Halloween, check your maintenance coverage.
Make sure your systems are truly alive and not the living dead!
Because in IT, the real horror isn’t ghosts, vampires, or monsters…
It’s seeing this message when you need it most:
💀 “Access to updates… denied.”
About the Author
Chris Smith
Chris Smith is a Non-Executive Director and commercial advisor with over 30 years’ experience in IT services across managed services (MSP) and third-party maintenance (TPM). With a background in IBM hardware maintenance, he progressed from field engineer to Sales & Marketing Director, helping to create the foundations of Blue Chip Cloud, which became the largest IBM Power Cloud globally at the time. He played a key role in the sale of Blue Chip in 2021 and subsequently led commercial growth and integration initiatives within Service Express, including delivering significant managed services growth and strengthening revenue predictability. Chris now works with private equity-backed, investor-led and founder-owned IT services businesses, supporting growth, commercial strategy, integration and exit readiness. He is particularly focused on helping organisations improve revenue quality, margin discipline and scalable go-to-market execution across MSP and TPM models.
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