This was first published on DeveloperWorks in 2012 and was read by 28358 people.

The message is still true today.

Earlier today I received email from a customer reporting their large POWER7 based machines where on firmware 720_64 to 720_90 and their reluctance to take the outage to upgrade it. They were asking for fine details of newer firmware levels and what advantages this would bring to "justify the outage to their user departments".
 
To be blunt this is a horror story:
I lay awake at night in a cold sweat about stories like this. The customer has the whole "running computers plan upside down".  The question should be "can I risk not having the latest firmware" and user departments should expect either:

If the computer stops and it has firmware that is 2 years out of date ... it is the computer departments fault!  Particularly, if the firmware dates back to the initial release - this level would not even have CHARM enabled! As that arrives roughly 3 to 6 months after GA.

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Large machines running POWER Systems Firmware on the initial generally availability releases of firmware often dating back to many years - running this in my humble opinion "bonkers".   Take a metaphor from maintaining your car:

• When a red light starts blinking on the dashboard of your car - Do you ignore it for two years? 
• What if you have 4 red lights, 2 orange lights and the words "Warning!!" flashing on the dashboard?
• What would it take to get you to take the car to the garage to get it fixed? A complete break down 50 miles from town? In computer terms, a failure that takes days to fix.  A major life threatening accident with your family in the car? In computer term, you are sacked for incompetence!

• https://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/set2/flrt/sas?page=mtm-terminology

Exercise for the student:
Find your current Firmware Level then go up the FixCentral web-page counting the number of "Severity:  HIPER - High Impact/PERvasive, Should be installed as soon as possible."  warnings to the current best level.  This is the number of red lights on the dashboard.

My customer has five red lights on the dashboard and they are asking "Do we really need to update?".  My customer is "bonkers".  If they have an "incident" on these machines, the urge to say "we told you so!" will be overpowering.

 Good News:

I am told they can take a non-disruptive update of their firmware to older firmware (a better sane level without downtime) but they really should get to the latest version or one level back from that is it has just come out.

 The Smart Money:

Larger changes from (upping the major number like in our firmware above SV860 to SV870 are likely to be disruptive)  - but I would very highly recommend this too and plan this in the next update cycle and certainly before the end of the year at the very latest.  There are many fixes and performance tweaks in the later Firmware levels, that I would highly recommend and especially for the large machines Power 770, Power 780, Power 795, E850, E880, E950 and E880.
I would put this in the "don't phone or email me with a performance issue unless you are on the latest firmware because you would be wasting my time addressing already fixed issues".
 
  Conclusions
I know System Firmware updates are boring and hard to schedule but it is not an option but ignoring the problem is not an option either.  Just like driving your car with your eyes closed so you can ignore the red lights on the dashboard is not an option.
Live Partition Mobility has been available for 10+ years and HACMP (PowerHA) available for decades and these make it relatively painless.
If you don't regularly update firmware, you are playing a high stakes poker game with

I don't think I can express that more clearly.