Re: Concurrent Maintenance/install features

[Jim Oberholtzer <midrangel@xxxxxxxxxx>]

My customer base divides into two groups, those that have financial, 
retail, or 24 hour operations, and those that have overnight outage 
windows.

Financial/Retail/24 operations generally will allow Saturday 
night/Sunday morning outage for maintenance.  Hardware, PTF, etc.  
Usually about 5 hours.  It is also adjusted for time zones.  That's when 
they would take the actions such as you are preparing to do.

Retail:  absolutely no changes (application or system)  from Labor day 
until usually about February 28.  It depends on the business lull 
between the year end holidays and Easter/spring.

Most of my customers will let an IBM CE put concurrent hardware in most 
anytime (outside of the special group retail/financial).  They trust the 
IBM CE far more than anyone else, and I agree.

Cache batteries:  Most folks do a one time shutdown and replace them all 
at once (and maybe it's overkill but after a "21" save to boot).  
Sometimes IBM will squawk about not wanting to replace batteries that 
are not due yet but most of the CEs are pretty good about it.   
Customers without IBM maintenance usually have me do it for them, again 
after a proper shutdown and cache flush and save.

That's a fairly wide group of customers in the upper midwest.

Jim Oberholtzer
Chief Technical Architect
Agile Technology Architects


On 2/1/2012 8:14 AM, Ingvaldson, Scott wrote:
> We are preparing to install an additional ethernet card in an open slot
> in our system unit.  It is (of course) capable of concurrent
> installation.
>
>
>
> I'm curious how many shops have policies that hardware changes can only
> be implemented during maintenance windows or off hours?  If so, what are
> policies concerning cache batteries or disk replacements?
>
>
>
>
>
> Regards,
>
>
>
> Scott Ingvaldson
>
> Senior IBM Support Specialist
>
>
>
>
>
> --