Dilemma

I was recently involved in a situation where a server’s hard drive failed. During research on the issue it was discovered that the server’s firmware and drivers were out of date. In fact they were never updated. Now my philosophy is, if it is not broke don’t fix it when it comes to firmware. OS security updates are different and should be applied (after testing) immediately. But firmware it is normally not a security fix but an enhancement to the hardware. If the hardware is working fine why tempt fate?

In my view, the time to update drivers and patches is at the request of vendor support and that usually happens when you are trying to fix a server. Most of the time support won’t even talk to you until you are the latest version of firmware and software. So the question is; do you make firmware and driver updates part of the regular server maintenance even if the server is in fine working condition? I know the answer would be yes if you are able to test the updates but how many IT shops have a test server for every model server they have. I have seen firmware and driver updates go bad more often than not. Is it worth risk on a production server that is working? Just food for thought.