NonStop NS-Series Planning Guide (H06.03+)

Planning for System Availability and Maintenance
HP Integrity NonStop NS-Series Planning Guide—529567-004
8-4
Implementing a Formal Change-Control Process to
Manage Change
Implementing a Formal Change-Control Process to Manage
Change
Change control is the process for proposing, planning, implementing, and testing
change and is a key requirement for minimizing the duration of planned outages.
Change control ensures the successful migration of a system or application from one
stable configuration to another by:
•
Ensuring that the scope and ramifications of the change are fully understood
•
Providing a recovery plan
•
Ensuring that problems and errors are anticipated and reacted to appropriately
•
Maintaining the security of your system and applications
The Availability Guide for Change Management provides detailed information about
managing changes to NonStop systems.
Minimizing Planned Outage Minutes
Although most changes can be performed while your system is online, certain changes
must be made offline. An offline change is any change that requires your system to be
shut down.
HP currently requires that you shut down your system to install a new version of the
operating system. The Availability Guide for Change Management provide more
information about how to minimize the time needed to install a new version of the
operating system. The effect that software product revision (SPR) installation has on
availability depends on the particular SPR being installed. For information about the
outage requirements for an SPR, refer to the documentation for that SPR.
An important component of many outages is the time required to shut down and start
up your system and applications. These general techniques can help you reduce this
time:
•
Writing efficient startup and shutdown command files
•
Implementing change-management practices to keep configuration, startup, and
shutdown command files current
•
Using parallel processing to distribute startup and shutdown processes across
multiple processors
The Integrity NonStop NS-Series Operations Guide provides detailed information about
these techniques.