Planned outage - is it a Change?

[oeaton]

Would a planned outage to move infrasture around be recorded as a low risk change?

[Corde Wagner]

When I'm assessing a change that includes moving of infrastructure, the risks you would evauate is the amount of infrastructure you're moving and the amount of complexity associated with the move of the infrastructure.

For example and in simple terms: moving an entire rack of non-redundant (not fault tolerant) servers from one side of the data center may carry more risk than moving a single blade to a different position in the same rack. Complexity of the same example would be that the entire rack of servers will require all new cabling, consideration for power redundancy, network connections, etc., and the single blade moved in the same rack won't have the same level of complexity.

Another way of looking at how to evaluate the risk, is to evaluate what the infrastructure is used for and what the impact will be if at the change window the services on that infrastructure is not available. If the services are not available means a loss of business, production output, reputation, etc., then the risks are high(er) regardless if the change is planned.

I hope this helps.

Corde