HP NonStop NS Minimizing the Frequency of Planned Outages, Anticipating and Planning for Change

Starting and Stopping the System Minimizing the Frequency of Planned Outages

Minimizing the Frequency of Planned Outages

To minimize the frequency of planned outages:

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Anticipate and plan for change Perform changes online

Anticipating and Planning for Change

Anticipating and planning for change is a key requirement for maintaining an enterprise-level, 24 x 7 operation. To avoid taking a NonStop NS-series system down unnecessarily:

•Evaluate system performance and growth—Track system usage and anticipate system capacity and performance requirements as new applications are introduced.

•Provide adequate computer room resources—Avoid unnecessary downtime by ensuring you have enough physical space and power and cooling capacity to handle future growth.

•Configure the system with change in mind—Configure the system in a way that easily accommodates future growth. One way to do this is to select limits that allow for growth. For example, by configuring enough objects to provide for the anticipated growth of your online transaction processing environment, you can increase the maximum number of objects controlled by PATHMON objects without a system shutdown.

Stopping Application, Devices, and Processes

Whenever possible, schedule system shutdowns in advance so that system users are prepared. Then, stop applications, devices, and processes in an orderly fashion. To include shutdown commands in a shutdown file, see Stopping the System on

page 15-16.

Unless you stop a system in a careful and systematic manner, you can introduce abnormalities in the system state. Such abnormalities can affect disk file directories and can cause the processors to hang in an endless loop when you attempt to load your system.

You must be aware of which processes must not or cannot be stopped. For example, some TCP processes must not be stopped. System processes must not be stopped. Generic processes configured to be persistent cannot be stopped.

Note the effect on the system when you stop these applications:

•Stopping Pathway applications begins shutdown of all TCP objects (shutting down TERM objects and then themselves) in parallel. New work is disallowed. The PATHMON process logs the start and completion of SHUTDOWN2. It does not log status messages during shutdown.

HP Integrity NonStop NS-Series Operations Guide—529869-005

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