There's a real irony to my article this week. Just as I began to write, I got an e-mail from one of my hosted service providers. To paraphrase the message, it says: "Dear Customer, we will be performing maintenance on your application server for a few hours this weekend. We plan to install critical software updates and security patches. During this window you may experience brief interruptions in service. Sorry for the inconvenience."
You've seen similar messages before. Perhaps you even write them and send them out to your own customers when you need to install software updates and security fixes. While the process of installing software updates is disruptive and expensive -- Gartner estimates downtime for a critical system costs $42,000 an hour -- there's no getting around the need to apply updates. According to Microsoft, 90 percent of the attacks in the wild exploit known vulnerabilities.

It's essential to patch systems to keep them reliable and secure. But while you must patch, must you reboot the server to apply the patch? Not necessarily.

There's a new subscription service launching this week that provides rebootless updates. Ksplice has just announced the general availability of its Ksplice Uptrack service for Linux servers. When a vendor releases software updates, Ksplice makes those updates into a module that can be applied to a server without rebooting it. This saves you the hassle of notifying customers of downtime and planning for staff members to work at 2:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning. The update can be applied painlessly and without any disruption to anyone's work.

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