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New businesses and small teams don’t think about support and maintenance plan until something forces them to think about it. It’s good practice to have documentation about your computing environment, have procedures in place and thoughts around other areas such as disaster recovery. It’s also important to have a backup person to go to if your main IT person is not around. Here’s an outline of a plan that covers the major components.

Start with a description of your current infrastructure:

- Inventory all equipment.

- Make a list of vendors contact data and account numbers.

- Create a detail network map.

- Make a list of the tools and applications you currently use and what they do.

- Document any special configuration.

Tip: Consider taking a picture of the setup to help others visually identify the setup… Of course, this really only helps if you’re lab isn’t row-after-row-after-row of the same rack-mounted guys. :)

Preventive Maintenance:

List activities you can do here. For example, think about expected life of the equipment, budget for new equipment, additional capabilities for the system (planning for expansion), and how to find deficiencies in your system.

Maintenance Procedures:

- Start a log book for keeping records of all activities.

- Set a time (downtime) when you can take down the network. Example: last Friday of the month from 1am – 3am.

Server Maintenance

- Check Hardware – clean when necessary (machines, cables, switches, battery backup).

- Review logs for errors.

- Run MS Baseline Security.

- Make sure Antivirus protection up to date.

- Disk Cleanup & Defrag.

Ask the question: How many of these activities can be automated using Windows Task Scheduler?

Updates

Install only during downtime. Before running updates make sure you backup the machine. Plan ahead what updates you need to run (Microsoft, Firmware and other utilities).

Try out: Windows Server Update Service (WSUS).

Health and Performance Monitoring

- What data do you want to collect?

Current performance, identify incidents, unusual traffic/congestion, etc.

- What are you currently using?

- What are the steps or checks to be done here?

Tip: Run tests on a healthy network and compile data that you can use to compare against results in the future.

Power Failure

In the case of a power failure, what happens to your computing environment. Sure you have a UPS, but if the power fails and you’re not around to properly shutdown the system, what then? Consider setting up a program that detects when the UPS battery is on and automatically shutdowns the machine. Finally, test to see if the UPS works.

Backups

- Where are you storing the backups?

- Write instructions for labeling and storing all backup files.

- Test the restore process, make sure the backup works.

- Create a schedule and have it set to automatically run.

Disaster Recovery Plan:

Create scenarios is probably the best to way to understand dependencies, the impact of a failure, and identify critical components. For each scenario think about how you will recover data, if there’s a redundant system to switch to, pirorities, etc.

Who’s Responsible for What?

Last but not least…assign people to the task that you define.

Nancy Wu, Operations Manager
Tyemill, LLC
http://www.tyemill.com

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