Many companies, because of the improving reliability of computer
hardware in general, have become blasé about how and where they keep their
fundamental equipment, the servers. In addition, computing itself seems to
breed even more computing, so that banks of servers often grow seemingly
without human help. This might be nowhere more true than in any sort of
health care setting. Needless to say, when servers go down in a health care
settingâ€"especially if it looks as if they are doing so without human
interventionâ€"it can be especially damaging to the mission and operations of
the facility. Yet, despite professional IT departments serving the hands-
on health care and administrative needs of a health-care facility, glitches
can happen. Diagnosing them can be tricky, especially since the maladies
that can afflict these servomechanisms can be almost as subtle as those
Toronto's Baycrest Centre is one of the largest geriatric care
facilities in Canada. So it is essential that its bank of 50-plus servers
maintain the 99.9 percent uptime figure the IT department had enjoyed until
the increasing miniaturization of these new units ended up in wasted space.
IT decided to remodel that space so it could be used for other purposes.
About that time, the servers began experiencing downtime in patterns no one
could figure out, and for reasons none of the staff or even consultants
called in could find. Every system that could possibly have had an effect
on the servers was consulted about. While there were some minor problems
in all areas, nothing could be connected to the intermittent problems
Solving the problem seems to be almost providential. A Hewlett
Packard sales representative mentioned he'd recently seen a similar
situation elsewhere and had an idea that the problem migh
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