> Wayne WIlson wrote:
>>
>> 2a) I am 'embedded' in the US health care delivery system,
>> managing computer
>> servers. Our current trend is to obsolete computers every 3 to 5
>> years,
>> replacing them with ever more powerful and power consuming
>> models. I have been
>> on the 'bleeding' edge of trying to conserve power, but in less
>> than three years
>> of growth, we have exhausted the capacity of our power feeds
>> coming in ~ 30KW
>> and our cooling capacity for that power load.
>
> Yes. I had cause to visit one of the data centres for the govt health
> organisation for which I work a few weeks ago, to inspect our
> population
> health servers (which occupy just one rack). I was surprised to notice
> several new racks of servers, each absolutely full of "blade" servers
> each with 20 or 30 CPUs in each unit i.e. hundreds of CPUs per
> rack, and
> there were several such racks. Drooling at all that computational
> power,
> I asked what they were for. The answer: "They are Citrix servers
> for the
> XYZ application." For those unfamiliar with it, Citrix is a (closed
> source) technology which allows Windows desktop sessions running on
> central servers (the huge bank of blade servers) to be remotely
> controlled from Windows desktops via a thin client. Rather like VNC
> for
> Windows, but a bit more sophisticated. The XYZ application was a
> Windows
> GUI app which needed to be accessed from wards in hundreds of public
> sector hospitals, and the use of Citrix and the centralised virtual
> Windows desktops very appropriately avoided the hassle and expense and
> difficulties of installing the application in so many locations.
> However, knowing that the GUI application in question did not have a
> terribly complex interface, I could not help but reflect that had the
> software been implemented as a Web application, then only a handful of
> central servers would have been needed to service it. The (valid)
> arguments were that redeveloping the application in question as a Web
> app would have cost more than the banks of Citrix servers etc
> needed to
> deploy it as a Windows GUI application, and that the Citrix servers
> could be used for other Windows apps in the future. All true. But
> there
> is a lesson there for software developers who wish their code to be
> deployed in places where there are not the funds available to purchase
> large banks of Citrix servers...
...on the other hand, the budget for one Citrix deployment of the
scale you are describing is probably sufficient for a an agile web
application development project which is comprehensively robust and
well engineered enough to compete as an alternative to the server and
power and sysadmin intensive solution you are describing. And if
the web app is developed in once in open source, then the entire
dynamic of options available to frontier sites is altered. But you
expect to hear me say this because it is what I have been doing while
embedded in a rural health care setting in California....
Btw, check out these folks
http://www.inveneo.org/
Their solutions are developed in San Francisco and prototyped in Africa.
[wr]
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will ross
project manager
mendocino informatics
216 west perkins street, suite 206
ukiah, california 95482 usa
707.462.6369 [office]
707.462.5015 [fax]
www.minformatics.com
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"Getting people to adopt common standards is impeded by patents."
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, BCS, 2006
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