Slashdot Mirror
Hospital Brought Down by Networking Glitch
hey! writes "The Boston Globe reports that Beth Israel Deaconess hospital suffered a major network outage due to a problem with spanning tree protocol. Staff had to scramble to find old paper forms that hadn't been used in six years so they could transfer vital patient records and prescriptions. Senior executives were reduced to errand runners as the hospital struggled with moving information around the campus. People who have never visited Boston's Medical Area might not appreciate the magnitude of this disaster: these teaching hospitals are huge, with campuses and staff comparable to a small college, and many, many computers. The outage lasted for days, despite Cisco engineers from around the region rushing to the hospital's aid. Although the article is short on details, the long term solution proposed apparently is to build a complete parallel network. Slashdot network engineers (armchair and professional): do you think the answer to having a massive and unreliable network is to build a second identical network?"
Crap!
The problem was with having unqualified personnel (a physician) serving the function of an IT guy who would be qualified enough to wonder if it's all going to come crashing down around him way, way before it actually does.
A network that can be brought down by an application is not of production quality.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I agree.... It seems everybody has fallen under the spell of Ethernet. There ARE other networking technologies out there which have not been "patched" over the years to make viable today. Ethernet was never designed to be redundant, spanning tree is merely a band-aid. As is almost every technology available for Ethernet. Traffic management could have saved this network, Cisco's attempt at Quality of Service, really Class of service, may have made a difference. To build two redundant Ethernet networks is ridiculous. If you are going to spend the money, do it right use a technology which was designed for the very, very large networks. Build a carrier class network. Use a technology like ATM build a redundant mesh. ATM was designed from the ground up to allow for redundancy and Quality of Service, true Quality of Service. Redundant links will NOT be disabled, they will be used in a load sharing manner increasing backbone availability and capacity. The problems are inherent with Ethernet. A enterprise network of this scale should not be built with a cookie cutter. Ethernet is great for a home network and small enterprise. But very large networks should look for alternative technologies.