Hardware is a crucial component of your IT infrastructure. It’s also an investment that you need to protect.
You can ensure that this investment will last and help you get the most out of your IT ecosystem by adopting a server maintenance plan.
What is a server maintenance plan?
A server maintenance plan is a strategic approach to monitoring and improving the performance of your servers. It can prevent issues and help you get more out of your hardware. Your plan should outline the different elements you want to check, how often you want to monitor their performance and the solutions you will implement.
Ideally, your maintenance plan should be adapted to the scope of your IT infrastructure and to your unique needs and risks.
There are benefits in terms of cost. A good maintenance plan can prevent downtime, which can cost anywhere from $1-5 million per hour.
A maintenance plan can also extend the lifespan of your servers by addressing overheating, electrical surges, storage and other issues. Being proactive about these things will lower the cost of maintaining your hardware over the years.
What to look for in a hardware maintenance plan?
Your maintenance plan should include the following components.
Patching
Installing a patch on a server means rolling out an updated version of the OS or of one of the applications you run. It’s typically a small change, but patches are important because they can address cybersecurity vulnerabilities and bugs. They can also optimize performance.
Managing patching can get complex if you run several applications or have more than one server. Your maintenance plan should include a strategy for managing patching, possibly with automation.
Temperature control
A good hardware maintenance plan should address the environment in which you keep your equipment. A server room should have a temperature of 59-80.6°F to prevent overheating. You’ll also have to address airflow, humidity and static.
Besides helping with energy consumption, the right environment can prevent overheating, which can weaken memory, motherboards and power supplies and even cause CPUs to fail.
Hard disk space
Usage can affect the lifespan and performance of a hard drive. To keep these components in good working order and make them last longer, you should incorporate policies for data storage into your maintenance plan.
Limiting the amount of data you store on each hard drive will prevent performance issues. If a hard drive is too full, a server might not have enough memory to run applications without freezing. You might run into issues with fragmentation as well.
Anti-virus
It’s best to have malware protection at the server level in case a file from an untrustworthy source is executed on one of your servers. Once a virus contaminates a server, it can affect its performance and spread to other components of your architecture without mentioning the threat it poses to any sensitive data stored on the server.
How an MSP can help with hardware maintenance
As a managed service provider, SecureTech offers customized solutions for hardware maintenance, including server maintenance plans. We can perform a tech review to assess the current state of your IT infrastructure and work together to develop a maintenance plan that will expand the lifespan of your servers while optimizing their performance. And our offer cable management services to improve the efficiency of your server room. To learn more, contact us today.