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?"

Comments

:( Hey I submitted this a week ago :O

[Flamesplash]

So when I submitted this a week ago it gets rejected, but now that Mr. hey! submits it, it gets accepted. I see what's going on. Damn I need more punctuation in my handle.

Re:Spanning tree

[lucifuge31337]

This would imply that either: A) A campus could afford to do Layer 3 at every closet switch
[...]
I'm sure in a healthcare environment, neither is an option. The first is too expensive (unless you buy cheap, and hence unreliable equipment) and the second is too risky.
Good points, but in this scenario, L3 at all wiring closets seems like it would be much cheaper than a SECOND PARALLEL NETWORK. Most hospitals I've worked in (larger ones) are already running a class of switch in the closets that will support such features with a simple upgrade (Cat 55xx, etc.....). Toss in an RSM and enable VTP.