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

[Jerry Kemp]

Every large company will have its own maintenance rules and maintenance windows 
unique to their needs.  And most of them will suck.

The best maintenance window policy that I have ever seen at a company was about 
15 years ago.   I was at a *large* oil company with offices all around the 
world.  As such, there was no outage that wasn't going to affect someone somewhere.

With that in mind, maintenance could only be scheduled Monday thru Thursday, 
8:00 AM to 5:00 PM.  No evenings, no weekends, no holidays.

Aside from the earlier point, the other driving factor was that if things got 
out of hand, and we had to call for vendor support, they wanted for us to be 
able to reach the "A team" at the vendor location who could provide the best 
support.

Most vendors don't keep their top support personnel on site after normal 
business hours.

Again, this was 15 years ago, I have no idea how things work there now.

to address your other issue for "3+ layers of meetings" and "buy off".   That 
stuff gets proportionally worse typically the larger your organization is.

And as far as bad policies, rules and window times.   I bet half the people 
subscribed to this list could write a book.

Jerry




On 09/26/14 04:42 PM, Scott Voll 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?
>
> I'm just trying to understand what the norm is, "in the real world".
>
> Thanks
>
> Scott