[c-nsp] OT: Enterprise (Not ISP) Maintenance Windows

[Eugeniu Patrascu]

On Sat, Sep 27, 2014 at 12:42 AM, Scott Voll <svoll.voip at gmail.com> wrote:

> For those of you working in an enterprise, company, agency, etc.  Do you
> have a standard (network) maintenance windows?
>
> If so, when?  How often?  Can you schedule anything in it, or if it will
> cause an outage does it need to go through 3+ layers of meetings and buy
> off to get it approved before you can schedule it?
>

>From my experience, things tend to fall into different situations:
1) normal enterprise with daily activities where would have maintenance
windows from 9PM-6AM and put whatever you want in them (banks for example
for non-customer facing things)
2) around the clock enterprises and you would have smaller maintenance
windows for normal things and using the weekends for the heavy stuff
(support centers etc.)
3) 24/7 operation with redundancy and you work on one component at a time
so that the risk is minimized (for example factories)

Outages are inevitable, it's up to the engineers working on them to have
the knowledge to fix them in a reasonable amount of time.



> I'm just trying to understand what the norm is, "in the real world".
>

I've worked in environments where an OK from the IT management would
suffice and places where do change a route would take 7 days with tons of
approvals.

The real world pretty much depends on the company size and how the internal
processes are defined. There are companies that have the "let's get the job
done" attitude and there are the "CYA first, and if there is time let's do
some work" attitude.

Long story short, look at your enterprise, see what would be the risky
things and do them over the weekend (upgrades, migrations etc.) and have
daily standard windows for "business as usual stuff" (patches, reboots etc).

Regards,
Eugeniu