Definition
End of Marketing marks the date IBM withdraws a hardware model from new sale. After EOM, a factory-new unit of that machine type can no longer be ordered from IBM, but the change applies only to future purchases, not to hardware already installed and running.
Buyers frequently confuse EOM with the later End of Service Life milestone. A model can be well past EOM and still fully supported by IBM for years, which is why the two dates should always be checked separately before assuming a withdrawn-from-marketing system is unsupported.