Out-of-warranty repairs for IMS2000 and ShowVault/IMB discontinued

[Leo Enticknap]

Dolby may have inherited these models from Doremi, but they continued to sell new ones until January 2020 (IMS2000) and June 2020 (SV/IMB). Someone who bought a new SV/IMB just before sales were discontinued, did not extend the OEM warranty, and accidentally loses the certificate at the first battery swapout later this year will only have gotten around three years out of it. Even by IT industry standards, that is a very short service life.

Yes, a lot of rack servers use off-the-shelf generic parts, Power supply modules, fans, RAID drives, and RAM modules can all be replaced with generic parts. But if the motherboard dies you are likely dead in the water (for a decade-old server, it would likely be a case of trying to find a used one on Ebay), and if the media block dies, you are absolutely dead in the water.

[Steve Guttag]

As i recall, the IMS2000 coincided with the acquisition of Doremi. That is, Dolby acquired Doremi while the IMS2000 was still in development (late stage) and it never had a Doremi badge on it. As such, that is a Dolby product that Dolby could hardly claim that it was something they merely got stuck with and might only have limited support (like, say the IMS1000, which was in competition to their own DSS line). In fact, Dolby canned their DSS line of servers in favor of the IMS2000.

[Ioannis Syrogiannis]

A detail that seems interesting:
On the latest Dolby Approved Drive List (May 2023), there is no mention on DSS products any more.
As came Spring, so came Spring Cleaning.
Edit: I should have looked better. That's not this year's Spring Cleaning... there wasn't any DSS product on last year's list either.

I once heard that keeping the IMS development and discarding the DSS was part of the deal for Dolby to buy Doremi. But, then again, that's just something I heard.

[Leo Enticknap]

I presume that none of the originally approved drive models for DSS servers are made any more, and that there are no DSS servers left under any sort of warranty, hence dropping them off the list.

My recollection is the same as Steve's: I've never encountered a Doremi-badged IMS2000.