Monthly Maintenance Plan

Information Technology will perform its regular monthly maintenance program on the third Sunday of each month starting at 7:00 AM. The monthly maintenance program is a preventive measure that is essential to providing stable and secure systems to the campus.

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. Monthly maintenance is scheduled from 7:00 AM until 1:00 PM on the third Sunday of each month. Even though the maintenance period calls for six hours, interruptions to customers are typically brief. Customers are notified via email in advance of system down time during the week prior to the maintenance procedure. A System Alert is placed on the home page of the HSC main campus Web site on the day prior to Monthly Maintenance, and a message is recorded on the System Alert Hotline (405-271-4747 or 800-992-5411).

Justification
The plan seeks to satisfy the following criteria:

Suitable vendor support. Experience has taught us that overall quality of support during overnight hours is unacceptable, and that availability of experienced engineers is significantly better during the day. Since risks and the resulting need for support is highest during maintenance procedures (e.g. system reboots, patch installation and software upgrades), maintenance should be scheduled during daytime hours to minimize downtime.
Minimize service interruption to customers. Although the maintenance is scheduled for a seven hour time period, interruption to customers 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 customers. Examples of this include email and authentication servers.

Identify an overall low network utilization period for maintenance. Weekend evenings tend to show higher utilization than weekend mornings.
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. This includes email and PeopleSoft systems.
Avoid academic and administrative calendar conflicts. A scheduled maintenance for the third Sunday of the month usually avoids conflicts with academic activities.
A single consolidated maintenance period for all IT HSC enterprise systems and networking. A single monthly maintenance period eliminates confusion for customers, minimizes the number of service disruptions, and provides coordination for the HSC IT infrastructure groups.