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Defusing the Stress Factor in Firmware Updates and Software Patches

alainc| June 22, 2012
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If you run a virtualized environment, you know that it is a complex thing to manage, despite the always-great messaging on simplification. I’ve blogged around this topic many times, and please, don’t hide your head in the sand, think hard how you manage yours.

 

Your best vendors for servers, storage, network, virtualization software, applications … they all want you to be safer and more successful in using their products. So they have to avoid this breach and correct that bug, and they issue firmware updates and software patches. What do you do then?

 

Many questions may arise about whether you should apply them or not. What are the consequences if you do apply all of them? Well, a number of organizations find that their environment isn’t working as well as it was before the patch. You know, some of these fixes may not be compliant with the rest of the environment. The first thing to look at is whether the interaction is likely to be positive, neutral or risky before applying a patch.  Many companies ask HP to manage that decision for them, and for good reason.

 

Then, if the decision is to apply the change, how do you proceed? It can be quite hard to do it right, in sequence – and that’s something I’ve learned that a lot of people forget, that it’s highly important to respect the sequence – without interrupting the service to your users. When you do that once or twice a year, you may find yourself sweating in case you make an error! Stress at the maximum.

 

Of course, you can follow the 10 best practices to streamline updates of firmware and software drivers and run your HP BladeSystem environment at top efficiency. Or, you may decide just to request HP to do it for you, either on demand or as a regular service. Much more clever. If it takes 3 days for a specialist, how long will it take for you?

 

Visit HP Care Support Services before your next patch.

Tags: firmware| HPTS| patch| virtualization
Labels: Always On Support| Always On Support Services| Care Services| Technology Services| Virtualization
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alainc | ‎06-22-2012 08:55 AM
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And it's a good time to thik of it, as VMware advises to patch vulnerabilites.

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  • More than 30 years in Sales and Marketing in IT services business. Currently managing global campaigns for Datacenter Care.
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  • I am an identical twin. My brother’s name is Chris Tinker and we have been extremely fortunate working similar careers within HP, known to our HP colleagues and many of our customers as "The Tinkers". Our job is to be the technical lead on major business operational outages with millions of Dollars/Euros hanging in the balance. We both have a complete background in architectural, Infrastructure and application environments from both the proactive and reactive side of HP Enterprise Service (HP ES), and HP Enterprise Business (HP EB). We have always attended the same schools, studied the same material (big surprise, as we are identical twins), and have always worked as a close team and strive to demonstrate our teaming ability’s to others. We each have more than 11 years experience supporting mission-critical enterprise customers on a broad range of technologies. We’ve both won the HP MVP award multiple times as well as coauthored books, programs, and whitepapers in our spare time.
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