Re: Concurrent Maintenance/install features

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





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