Top 5 Server Maintenance Best Practices - CXtec

In today’s digital world, servers play a crucial role in running your business smoothly. The role of servers is to combine your computing, networking, storage access, and virtualization platforms into a unified cohesive system. As they are the core business components that manage vast quantities of data every day, it is important to ensure that they function at full capacity. Any hardware or software inadequacy in servers can lead to a server crash. Businesses can lose important information and thousands of dollars on server repair or replacement. Companies need to adopt effective maintenance practices to help identify potential issues early on to prevent unplanned downtime and loss of data. This is why server maintenance is crucial.

Server maintenance is the process that helps to eliminate downtime and extend servers' lifespan by identifying and resolving issues proactively, keeping servers running and updated. The process involves regular server diagnostics, hardware and software checks/updates, patch installation, and more to protect servers and business-critical data from crashing. Businesses must have an effective and customized maintenance plan to ensure full-time server availability.

Let's look at the five server maintenance best practices that businesses must follow to prevent server outages.

Server Maintenance Best Practices

• Use Management or Monitoring Tools to Get Instant Alerts: One of the best practices to ensure that your servers are running smoothly is to use server monitoring tools. These tools track and monitor the health of your servers in real-time while administering a critical network and send instant notifications if it detects any issues. These tools also check operating system, hardware, logs, and user access to provide better insights into server performance and issue resolution. The data gathered with the help of server monitoring tools, your administrators can address potential issues proactively before they cause significant damage or downtime. 
• Ensure Sufficient Power For Your Server: Modern servers need high power usage for uninterrupted operations under high request loads. In such circumstances, you need to ensure a continuous and ample amount of power supply with reserves for all of your servers to run smoothly. This requires a carefully-planned power usage strategy. 
• Critical Software Patch and Firmware Updates: Software patches are a set of changes to a computer program or its supporting data designed to update, fix, or improve its functioning. However, updating and implementing software requires thorough testing to ensure that your hardware can accommodate the software patch. This can be done by performing additional research and due diligence to avoid compatibility issues and hardware errors.  
• Obtain Reliable Replacement Parts for Your Server: Server hardware failure can interrupt business-critical services. Therefore, it is important to repair or replace the hardware as soon as you detect hardware failure. And review compatibility matrices for hassle-free hardware repair and replacement.You need to make sure that the replacement parts meet all the specifications of the compatible replacement unit. 
• Practice Routine Preventive Maintenance: Servers work 24/7/365, accumulating a lot of heat and particles, which requires regular attention and maintenance. One of the easiest ways to lengthen the server’s reliability is to practice routine preventative maintenance. Preventive maintenance is the regular and routine maintenance performed on physical assets to avoid hardware failure and unplanned downtime and extend the server’s life and functionality. Preventive maintenance tasks include regular and systematic hardware inspection (for component failures and overheating), cleaning, updating operating systems, auditing data backup, testing security systems, and reviewing data and storage usage.   

Why Should You Hire a Professional For Server Maintenance?

Undoubtedly, conducting routine maintenance checks can reduce risks and mitigate the harmful effects of common server problems, but outsourcing server maintenance to a professional crew can offer multiple benefits such as:

• You get recommendations for the latest tools and techniques helpful in maintaining your servers
• You get warranties for hardware spare parts even after the EOSL
• You get services from experienced professionals when it comes to repairing or replacing hardware, troubleshooting issues, and optimizing software
• You get round-the-clock server maintenance support and more

Why Choose CXTec as your Server Maintenance Partner?

Server infrastructure typically features multiple hardware layers to support a robust and resilient virtualization operation. Therefore, it becomes crucial to manage and maintain servers regularly so that they can perform their operations without any failure. To ensure that your digital infrastructure operates at full capacity every day, CXTec, with over 40 years of experience in the industry, offers flexible and customized support and maintenance services. These services include:

• Expert professionals to help maximize your investments and focus your time on other business-critical tasks
• The world’s best pre-owned infrastructure hardware and blended solutions that delivers quality, reliability, and savings
• Flexible third-party maintenance options to reduce OPEX 
• Hardware end-of-life management services that maximize value and safeguard your sensitive information

Moreover, CXTec RapidCare® service provides the highest quality replacement parts and the most knowledgeable technical support. They assess each server make and model in your infrastructure environment to ensure that they have longer lifespans. CXTec RapidCare® offers: 

• FRU-for-FRU exact part replacement
• Expert advice from server hardware professionals
• break-fix troubleshooting
• Essential operating system support and backup