NonStop S-Series Planning and Configuration Guide (G06.29+)

Planning for System Availability and Support
HP NonStop S-Series Planning and Configuration Guide—523303-021
10-4
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. 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 NonStop S-Series Hardware Installation and FastPath Guide,
and 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 will have on availability depends
on the particular SPR being installed. Refer to the documentation for the SPR for
information about the outage requirements for that SPR.
An important component of many outages is the time required to shut down and start
up your system and applications. The following 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 Introduction to NonStop Operations Management provides detailed information
about these techniques.