[olug] Best Practices Recommendation

[Andrew Embury]

Hello,

My group maintains about 50 and growing x86 servers (Tier 1 - Dell and HP)
running Windows and Linux (mostly Windows) throughout the city.  We have a
number of servers internally, but most of them belong to external clients.
My question is, do those of you in similar circumstances proactively
update items such as BIOS Firmware, RAID controller firmware, and driver
updates (NIC, RAID, etc)?

I've generally done these updates proactively internally, but am torn if
its worth it to apply such updates for external clients, most of whom
their servers and associated systems are running just fine and run
the risk of creating a problem or downtime that did not exist before.

Just to be clear, were not talking software and security updates...we
already quickly apply these.

I do have deployment tools to ease this should we decide to go ahead with
this.  I'm leaning towards no, and only applying these kind of updates if
they address a specific problem, but wanted to get other opinions and
experiences.

Thanks.

Andrew