You may not think of it as an epidemic, but our customers surely do. Patches, patches, everywhere and why should I care?

Here’s why: we’ve done some research that shows that for each 50mb of system software change per month, one “9” of availability is lost on the platform in question. All the sudden, it becomes clear that you don’t want to patch for patching sake, you want to patch for effect.

State of the art today is to look at metadata describing the change match to a system or set of systems and then work to apply them, sometimes semi-automatically sometimes manually. Here’s the catch: in an analysis of Linux and overall UNIX patches, we’ve discovered that 22% of the metadata is WRONG!

This presents a large risk to customers who are relying on vendors to ensure that the changes they introduce in their environment are accurate and necessary. For those of you who wonder why we purchased Aduva, here’s the answer. They’ve got technology that actually inspects the proposed change, compares it to the targeted systems, and determines in advance what changes will actually be made and dependencies in advance of applying the change. The accuracy level increases dramatically.

Over the past 2 weeks, I’ve had a chance to talk about this with numerous customers in large events and intimate 1:1 settings. I’ve yet to find one customer who isn’t greatly excited by the prospect of what we can do to help solve this set of problems.