I just did a one hour webinar sponsored by IBM and brought to the Internet by eWeek, a Ziff Davis Media publication. If I do say so myself I think it went very well. Elliot Markowitz of eWeek said he thought it was the best webinar so far this year.
Click Here for the Webinar: http://bit.ly/ltTkAP
Disaster Recovery: Learning from the Past to Get Ready for the Future
Enough boasting though… My partner on the webinar is Chris Preimesberger, Sr. Writer at eWeek where he focuses on virtualization, network monitoring, data center management and backup & disaster recovery/business continuity. Chris does a great job of laying out the trends in backup & disaster recovery/business continuity. Chris has the first half of the webinar and I come in during the second half with some great slides on RTO, RPO, comparison tables on tape, clustering/replication and disaster recovery appliances. It is well worth the hour to sit down and listen and watch.
Smoke testing is a term used to describe the testing process for servers after patches are applied. 
Estimating an average time for patching servers and PCs can be a bit tricky. It can vary from one month to the next, depending upon the number and complexity of the patches released by your software vendors. You must consider all versions of operating systems and have a complete inventory of all your application software to do this job correctly. Our experience has shown that manual patching of systems takes on average of about 1.5 hours each.
This is a basic cost calculator for you to compute your typical monthly cost for patching your servers, PCs, laptops, tablets and associated application software. It also forms the basis for you to begin calculating your Return on Investment for software patching, or for comparison with alternatives to the manual process of patching operating systems and application software—such as Patch Management as a Service, also known as Vulnerability Management as a Service.