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How Do I Provide a Workstation To Last 15 Years?
An anonymous reader writes "My father is a veterinarian with a small private practice. He runs all his patient/client/financial administration on two simple workstations, linked with a network cable. The administration application is a simple DOS application backed by a database. Now the current systems, a Pentium 66mhz and a 486, both with 8MB of RAM and 500MB of hard drive space, are getting a bit long in the tooth. The 500MB harddrives are filling up, the installed software (Windows 95) is getting a bit flakey at times. My father has asked me to think about replacing the current setup. I do know a lot about computers, but my father would really like the new setup to last 10-15 years, just like the current one has. I just dont know where to begin thinking about that kind of systems lifetime. Do I buy, or build myself? How many spare parts should I keep in reserve? What will fail first, and how many years down the line will that happen?"
Virtualize!
Then your father's old setup can remain DOS and Win95 effectively forever, on any modern hardware. I've done this for lots of clients with legacy WinNT and Win95 systems.
The process is called "physical to virtual" (P2V) migration.
Tell him that replacing the system every 5 years will be cheaper than getting one that will last 15 years. There, problem solved.
However, you should consider how to upgrade each part in isolation - or with small numbers of associated changes. That means using popular, but not bleeding-edge components. One's that (like with vintage cars) have a good number of enthusiasts using them. That means that spares will be available and the know-how to diagnose and fix problems will be available too.
The final fallback would be to buy two systems. Keep one in "deep freeze" until you need to cannabilse it for spares. However, don't expect the electrolytic capacitors to last that long.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
How about industrial hardware? You'll probably pay at least twice as much as you would for a consumer desktop, but PCs made for industrial control applications tend to be a lot more rugged and build to serve for many years in harsh conditions. Sounds like you don't need a lot of processing power, so you could probably get by with a fanless system and eliminate a major failure (and noise) source.
I haven't bought anything from these guys, so I don't personally know anything about their quality, but SuperLogics has a barebones fanless Atom-based system for $315. Something like that might be a good start.
15 years ago systems were night and day with the way they are now, and it's only going to get worse. After 10 years you won't be able to find anyone to work on the legacy stuff (unless you buy a proprietary unix system), and there is no guarantee for new parts.
The only way you've gotten away with it is that you have one application which has a very limited required environment, and drive interfaces have only changed once. If you stick with that philosophy, and get lucky with the drives again, you may be able to get by with something similar.
If you have to (which I don't recommend) then pick up a midrange quad core server with a ton of RAM and plenty of room for extra drives. Put a Linux distro on it: no hope of keeping up with Windows security for 15 years, and forget Mac, they're very prone to changing interfaces internally, and then discontinuing the old products.
Then use the server to push whatever app you need to some low duty desktops. You could use a web app, or a client/server desktop app. Again, you're probably good with a *nix.
Your biggest fear is drive space. In 15 years you won't be able to buy the drives you're using today, but there is no point in stockpiling them: they'll be dead in the box after 15 years. Solid state won't fail in the box (probably, but they're too new for it to have been tested) but you may have to replace them more often, depending on your utilization.
Just from personal experience, you're much better off buying a modest new system every 5 years, than a major new system every 15. It's cheaper, and the chance of a catastrophic failure are lower.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I wouldn't worry about the system having to last for 15 years if he's already a veterinarian. What is that, 140 years old? Wow.
Not so with the flash drives. I was looking into an equivalent for MTBF for flash drives, and not finding one i started looking into the maximum capacity of writes, and found an article extolling a sort of half-life figure for flash drives. looking into the drive i have installed in my media center (for Quiet) an OCZ model. i found that i'd have to be writing to the drive at maximum capacity 24/7 for 18 years before the available capacity of the drive would decrease by half. they're quite long-lived, if the maximum writes per sector figures are to be believed.
Your father might be in for a shock if he thinks he can keep running the same computer system for the next fifteen years. Almost all veterinary clinics have a web presence these days (if only contact info, a map, and some cute photos) so it's a cinch that in five years the bar will be raised to include real online functionality. Make an appointment, see when your dog is due for shots, see how much Poo-Poo weighed at his last checkup -- sounds nice, right? His current customers won't care if he falls behind, but without a steady stream of new customers, his practice will dwindle.
That means he needs to plan on new software. Software upgrades are much more painful and expensive than hardware upgrades, and new small business software has a way of running poorly on five-year-old machines. The next fifteen years will bring painful changes for his clinic's computer systems, much worse than simple hardware upgrades, and he is the one who will have to understand and deal with it. Of course, he might soon have the option of having his data and applications hosted elsewhere, so he might be able to keep the same hardware for the next fifteen years after all, but I don't think that scenario satisfies his current expectations.
Keep in mind that it may be prudent to pick less-reliable hardware that should still last 4 or 5 years (most likely), over slightly more-reliable hardware, WHEN the price difference makes it more cost-effective to ANTICIPATE replacement.
Even the most reliable components may be expected to fail in 5 years.
I think he's been very fortunate that his setup has lasted 15 years. On average, a computer has had a lifetime of 5 years, before some hardware failures occur. To be honest.. in many cases, newer hard drives has been less reliable or has not lasted as long.
The higher data density results in more failures not less. The more bits (at essentially the same rate of defects), means it's much more probable for there to be at least one sector defective on a larger drive.
Power supplies can fail within 1 year or 10. It's random, so there can be no guarantee that the setup will last 15 years without any hardware replacement. (Even using the hardware he has right now, something could have failed in 1 year. A drive could go completely bad tomorrow.)
So get a very decent power supply, preferably one that is efficient at the anticipated load (which you should calculate for the chosen hardware), but can handle a lot more.
Using SSDs would improve reliability if used in a RAID 1 array, and a choice made with decent cache and wear-levelling, provided your app is reasonable they should last 50 years (typical use level), more likely the RAM dies first.
But unfortunately, the suitable SSDs of any reasonable size are also highly expensive. the cheaper ones don't have the few gigabytes or so of battery-backed RAM cache that would be necessary for high speed. --- Which come to think of it, may also be a reliability risk, since most types of rechargeable batteries don't last 15 years.
And I expect you don't need high speed for a small veterinary database, so the most inexpensive SLC or MLC may be just what the doctor ordered..
Another possible application for flash is simply to boot off of it, and then use an ordinary mechanical hard drive for storing your data. This way, mechanical wear is not introduced when you boot your OS, and writes are rarely required.
However, Windows XP (or Vista) is not suitable for this, as it likes to write to its own boot media. A Linux-based kiosk with a mysql-backed database app of some sort could work great there.
Make sure you get a lot more space than you need, i.e. try to fit everything you need within 5 or 6 GBs. And use a 50gb drive, so you can have an "active" partition and "backup" partition
Minimize mechanical wear on your drives by getting enough memory to run the workstations without a swapfile or pagefile. i.e. get 1GB or 2GB (a workstation that can use ECC memory is better, as you reduce the small possibility of silent data corruption), and make sure you disable all paging/swapping features within your OS.
Use the most reliable drives available for a reasonable cost; these are probably NOT 1TB 7200RPM drives; these are more likely 30gb 5000RPM drives that come with a 3 year or 5 year warranty.
Have each workstation backup the other workstation, i.e. so there are always two copies of the database. This is in addition to daily backups to external media to be stored offsite.
Unless you are using a UNIX/Linux OS with a journalled filesystem (or something like ZFS), it's pretty much a fact, that you are likely going to need an OS recovery at least once.
Each workstation should have two drives and a 'working partition' and backup partition. That you manually refresh every few months. Even better if they are separate physical disks (but again, more expensive)
Reliability will be maximized if you use a UNIX or Linux based application. And you minimize unnecessary reads and writes to your mechanical media, and minimize unnecessary load (and therefore heat) emitted by your hardware.
In any case, the usernames logging into the worksta
Assuming that you have to rewrite his software, make it all web based (even if it runs off of one machine as a server without the Internet) and forgetaboutit. Keep it as basic and generic as possible and then the hardware will never matter.
My father is also a veterinarian with a private practice... I don't know enough about the exact details of his software but can give you the high level, as well as issues he has had, etc.
First, he has gone through a few (2 or 3 not sure) completely different systems (hardware and software) in the last ~20 years of having a "computerized" practice.
When they got the first system the practice was much smaller - 3 vets in the partnership and a handful of employees. Over time it has grown to employ another 3 full time vets and a much larger staff. So that's question 1: it may be small now, but do you expect it to grow? 2 networked workstations won't be enough if he may have 20+ employees in the future, and deciding on something today (hardware and software) that at least supports upgrades will go a long way to prevent having to redo the whole thing later.
Question 2 is related to the nature of his practice. Is it a relatively low-tech, rural practice or is he planning on modernizing/keeping up with technology? Back in the 70's the most high-tech equipment in most practices was the x-ray machine. Since then, my dad's practice has added an ultrasound, laparoscope, and most recently a digital x-ray that allows inexpensive, near instant access to results (without having to develop, etc) as well as convenient storage, display on a number of terminals in exam rooms, even convenient consults from remote specialists. That's in addition to all of the other benefits that come with professional veterinary software packages, like integration with outside labs to get faster test results, tracking of inventory and reordering, etc.
Question 3: how much does he care about his data/computer systems? If down is it a minor inconvenience or a crippling liability? If the latter, do you really want to build something for him with off the shelf parts with no support? Are you available for 24/7 support if something goes wrong? My dad's practice has 24/7 1 hour business support (from IBM? or something similar). If a system goes down, HDD dies, network is flaky, etc they will have someone there in less than an hour to replace hardware, diagnose issues, restore backups, etc. Sure, that service costs money but has been necessary several times over the past couple decades and saved their ass when it happened. On the other hand, if your father is basically using the machines for payroll, inventory, and bookkeeping, he might be ok with a simple backup system and your help when something goes wrong...
Anyway, I know my dad's practice now has a central server (I think just standard workstation HW with RAID and nightly backups?), a few terminals (I believe all Windows-based, since that's what the veterinary SW runs on), and most recently a medical grade monitor and high-res video card for x-ray display, along with a couple of WiFi laptops they use in exam rooms to show x-rays, look up histories, data entry, etc. All of it comes with 24/7 HW and SW support, which for their type of usage (and the fact they don't want or need a full time IT employee) I'd consider a must have...
Anyway, hope that helped. But to summarize I'd rank the goals as (not counting cost, which of course needs to be factored in depending on personal situation):
1) minimize downtime/lost revenue
2) allow modernization/support for new technologies as necessary
3) scalable if/when the practice grows in the future
What I would most definitely NOT worry about is the latest fancy hardware. If he's still surviving on a 486 with 8MB RAM, any reasonable modern HW will be cheap and more than enough. By all means go for reliability over performance, especially if you are doing it yourself. If buying HW/SW/support from a professional company, they will make sure the HW is adequate and reliable (since it costs THEM much more in the long run if it isn't).
On the software side, I would consider hosting the DOS app on linux using an emulator such as dosemu or dosbox. The OP's dad would have an environment very similar to what he's using now. I would probably use Debian stable for both boxes, which has very long release cycles and is very stable.
With linux comes the option to replace the DAT tapes with an off-site rsync over ssh. If the main box dies, you'd be able to just swap in the backup box in a couple of minutes. If the data set isn't very large the mirror will complete in a couple of seconds. It's very easy to do:
Create a RSA public/private key pair: ssh-keygen -t rsa, press enter at the password prompts.
Copy the public key to the remote box: ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub remotebox.
Have a nightly cron job to push the files: rsync -ave ssh --delete /localfiles/ remotebox:/localfiles.
For bonux points you could even throw in snapshots.
I'm backing up hundreds of partitions this way at work, each with snapshots going back a month. Tapes are slow, unreliable and expensive. I would not use them for any purpose.