MontaVista MVShield Extends Support of CentOS 7 Past June 2024
MontaVista MVShield Extends Support of CentOS 7 Past June 2024
MontaVista extends CentOS 7.9 operational viability beyond the June 30, 2024, End-Of-Life (EOL) date offering continued security updates and technical support via the MVShield commercial product.
San Jose, CA, 15th June 2023 –– MontaVista® Software, LLC, a leader in commercial Embedded Linux® products and engineering services, announces MVShield will continue providing CentOS 7.9 critical CVE updates and bug fixes along with technical support until at least June 2029. This extends CentOS 7.9 support well past the June 30, 2024, EOL date and gives customers an option to continue as long as needed.
CentOS 7 is a platform cornerstone for companies deploying communications, network/wireless infrastructure, medical and other solutions. Its features, stability and community support has made CentOS 7 a popular Linux distribution that companies have built on for their own solutions and products. With community support ending, companies are now faced with the difficult challenge of either migrating to completely new platform baseline or continuing to support their CentOS 7.9 based products on the market.
MontaVista developed MVShield to specifically address these long-term CentOS lifecycle concerns. MVShield, launched in 2019, has fast become the de facto choice for service providers, network/wireless infrastructure manufacturers and other market leaders for economically efficient and trusted RHEL compatible Operating System support. With MVShield, MontaVista maintains the customer’s specific CentOS 7.9 branch, including customer-specific additions - delivering CVE and bug fix patches on a quarterly basis. As community support fades, MontaVista utilizes expertise and resources to patch kernel and packages, even when requiring backporting from new versions or other distributions. In addition, MVShield offers Service Level Agreement (SLA) technical support focusing on diagnosing and fixing critical, hard to solve problems that can potentially shutdown a product or service.
MontaVista’s MVShield offers many benefits above and beyond increasing the lifespan of a CentOS 7 based platform. For instance, MVShield reduces the risk fulfilling support contracts and obligations as MontaVista supplies the critical CVEs needed to address evolving vulnerabilities and cybersecurity threats. MontaVista can also offer its Linux expertise to accelerate the time to fix when dealing with high pressure customer issues, and even help customers with support for specific hardware and add-on cards, including EOL baselines such as CentOS 7.9. Having MVShield cost effectively filling this critical support gap, in-house engineers are freed-up to focus on the companies’ core solutions. Finally, with CentOS 7.9 gaining extended support, product teams have more time to carefully plan and execute a migration path to the next RHEL compatible platform that will run its end products and solutions, which itself can also be supported by MontaVista’s expert staff if required by the customers.
“One of MontaVista’s core values is extending the Linux lifecycle so companies continue shipping and maintaining products through their entire lifespan. We have been doing this since 1999 with our own products and offer it now to CentOS users.”, said Jim Gallagher, Director of North America at MontaVista Software, “MVShield gives customers assurance their products can stay on the market, potentially longer than planned, maximizing revenue and satisfying committed customer service contracts in a cost-effective manner.”
MVShield for CentOS 6/7/8 is available now. MontaVista invites interested parties to contact MontaVista at sales@mvista.com and/or visit www.mvista.com for more information.
