Downtimes, how do you handle them?

[Jason Meyer]

I was just wondering how the rest of the Nation handles their IronPort downtimes? Are they a big production, scheduled, notification to clients, approved by management? Or are they stealthy, done behind the scenes, nobody is aware of the changes?

I can see pro's and con's to each way and I'm just wondering what the rest of the community does.

What I'm currently facing is our department is trying to minimize scheduled downtimes as much as possible. I was just told that my downtime window will coincide with our Active Directory infrastructure downtimes. My concern is if something breaks, was it a domain controller issue or was it a IronPort issue?

What are everyone else's thoughts?

[bfayne_ironport]

I don't think one is necessarily exclusive of other methods. I prefer to use a solution that fits the problem at hand.

I was just wondering how the rest of the Nation handles their IronPort downtimes?  Are they a big production, scheduled, notification to clients, approved by management?  Or are they stealthy, done behind the scenes, nobody is aware of the changes?

[Donald Nash]

Our appliances are hidden behind a load balancer, so in the past I've done stealth updates because they are completely unobservable. But management has recently gotten very persnickety about any changes whatsoever inside our organization, so now I have to announce the upgrade window a day in advance.