$U upgrade on 110 AIX servers. $U was upgraded from 6.3.01 to 6.3.41
This project was planned due to technical improvements in the tool and minimize incidents that can cause service disruption.
Client Overview - One of the world’s leading Oil & Gas giant in French region and across the world.
Business Requirements -
•Upgrade on critical 110 AIX servers
•No business impact during or after upgrade
•Better use of advanced features of the tool
•Reduction in frequent issues and incidents
Challenges -
•Upgrade without any incident or business impact as critical applications were impacted
•No separate downtime hence had to carry out upgrade strictly during weekly maintenance slot
•No prior experience for such upgrade
Approach -
•Understanding the requirements of the Customer
•Impact analysis for upgrade and consolidation
•Test upgrade conducted on sandbox system and validated by customer
•Created Upgrade planning as per weekly maintenance slots keeping critical applications and servers in mind
•Rollback plan in place in case upgrade is KO
•Upgrading the servers as per the planning
•Monitoring servers/batches after upgrade for 1 week so that there is no business impact
Customer Benefits and Key differentiation -
•Reduction in incidents because of frequent crashes in $U processes
•Better features as well as purge and maintenance releases available in new feature
•Highly stable environment which result in less no of service interruptions
•Developed L3 capabilities within team which will in turn benefit customer to handle operations and future projects
Documentation has to be prepared at every step so that it is easy to manage such projects in future