Monthly Maintenance Plan (times are left out for security purposes)
The Office of Information Technology will perform its regular maintenance program each month. The monthly maintenance program is a preventive measure that is essential to providing stable and secure systems to the county.
Background
Periodic maintenance on IT systems is mandatory. Here are some of the reasons why:
- Security patches
- Hardware upgrades
- Software patches and upgrades
- Software and component installations
- Re-configurations
- Server reboots
- Availability and fail-over testing
Maintenance usually lasts anywhere from four hours to over seven or eight hours when problems are identified. Many times, if a server is going to fail, it will happen during the reboots that are required during maintenance.
Monthly Maintenance Plan
The plan defines a single monthly time for maintenance across Information Technology systems. Even though the maintenance period calls for six hours, interruptions to employees are typically brief. Employees are notified via email in advance of system down time during the week prior to the maintenance procedure.
Justification
The plan seeks to satisfy the following criteria:
- Minimize service interruption to employees. Although the maintenance is scheduled for a seven hour time period, interruption to employees is brief for several reasons.
- Maintenance on each individual server may last from five to 20 minutes on average. The plan schedules seven hours due to the total number of servers being maintained.
- The level of redundancy inherent in the current infrastructure allows support personnel to perform maintenance on one or more servers while other servers continue to provide services to employees. Examples of this include email and authentication servers.
- Identify an overall low network utilization period for maintenance.
- Sufficient time to complete maintenance and resolve problems when they occur.
- Avoid schedule conflicts with database and system backups. All system and database backups run during the evening and early morning hours.
- Avoid administrative calendar conflicts.
- A single consolidated maintenance period for all IT enterprise systems and networking. A single monthly maintenance period eliminates confusion for employees and minimizes the number of service disruptions.
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