Preventive Maintenance Policy

[Harinath N]

Hi,

Can anyone suggest a standard preventive maintenance policy for HP 9000 L1000, A180c and R390 class servers.

Thanks and Regards.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi,
My advice from a hardware perspective is to do absolutely nothing. The greatest stress is placed on the components at cold boot. What I would suggest is that you place a great deal of emphasis on the quality of your environment.
If these boxes are in a clean, nearly dust-free, humidity and temperature controlled environment then nothing needs to be done. If your boxes are in a rather dusty environment then I would consider an annual vacuum cleaning of the machine interior.
If you are running well-behaved applications (i.e. no memory leaks) there is no need for periodic reboots.

Software maintenance is another issue entirely.
There I would suggest that you apply the support CD patchsets at regular intervals. Some admins prefer to stay one release behind so that major problems will be reported before they install. My preference is to apply the patches to a 'sandbox' environment first; test;
and if all is well apply the patches to production systems after about 2-3 weeks.

Following the steps above, I have not had a single system panic on any of my production systems in over three years.

Regards, Clay

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi:

I completely agree with Clay. In addition, I would make sure that you have Predictive Support and EMS loaded. Predictive Support is easily configured to email you and the Response Center nightly of any hardware problems. You can get current versions of both products from the SupportPlus CDROMs or from the ITRC:

http://www.software.hp.com/cgi-bin/swdepot_parser.cgi/cgi/displayProductInfo.pl?productNumber=B6191AAE

Predictive Support has alerted me of pending problems before they really became problems, on several occassions.

...JRF...