Hi everyone — looking for advice.
Since our last planned network maintenance period, the network (firewall included) was down for about 30 minutes. There was a very unfortunate coincidence that there were several business emergencies happening at the same time. As a result, the management of the business, has established ‘rules for IT maintenance’. This includes several email notifications, face-to-face conversations, etc.
This is all well and good, but the main problem is the maintenance windows they are allowing for planned maintenance: 30 seconds for minor outages on Thursday evenings between 10:30pm and 11:30pm and up to one hour for major outages on Saturdays between 10:30pm and 11:30pm.
In my opinion, this is unrealistic and we won’t be able to implement anything effectively. We are planning to VLAN the core network, implement a SAN, incorporate a blade server, and move to a data center in the next year.
What I need is advice and/or reference material on best practices for change management and/or maintenance windows for infrastructure maintenance in SMB companies.
Help!
