21–30 of 85 posts
That's not even stupid, that is moronic.
Given the information we had a week ago, I can see how Amazon may have looked like the best solution for HA. Their site never goes down, after all.
That's not even stupid, that is moronic.
Seriously? I know there's HIPAA standards for securing sensitive health records, but aren't there standards for system up-times?
If this is a serious post and there really is a service that monitors cardiac patients from home, first you would have to deal with the unreliability of in-home broadband connections. What if a router needs to be reset, or the DSL goes out? Even if you ignore that, you would expect that any server setup will go down at some time. It has happened to Google, Facebook, Twitter, and now AWS and PlayStation Network. I remember when Rackspace went down a few years back (a truck crashed into the transformer that powered the datacenter - http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2007/11/13/truck...). All of Armenia was knocked offline when a woman cut a fiber optic line while digging for scrap metal. I'm not sure I'd trust the internet with any kind of life or death monitoring.
Epic fail for the company which is hosting on their kit. Whoever threw it on there is a total dick. There is nothing wrong with EC2 here. It's just not the right tool for the job. If they are monitoring cardiac patients, they should, at least for non-critical people, have the instrumentation cache the data and send when available over leased lines. If it is critical, it should be PROPER HARDWARE attached to the POTS…
Ec2 is fine here. All systems have downtime. Its not having a backup system in place that's the problem.
Hmm... That would rather seem to be the monitoring company's own fault. Admittedly I haven't used ec2 for about 3 years, but I seem to recall there being an explicit disclaimer about how it wasn't supposed to be used for this kind of uptime-critical application. I want to say it even specifically mentioned medical stuff.
EC2 just shouldn't be ALL of the servers.
Without any background, it is really tough to tell where this fits. You can't blame the people for making the wrong decision until you know what the risk profile for the failure is.
"The Remote Health Monitoring System is the IT backbone that supports HealthFrontier’s entire portfolio of solutions, including the ecg@home™ and the microtel™/ecgAnywhere™. It captures data transmitted by the patient through USB, Bluetooth, or trans-telephonically. The RHMS™ then stores the information in a database, which can be accessed by the patient’s doctor through a web-based interface. Benefits include:
Cloud computing: The RHMS is hosted on a network of servers across the US, which increases reliability and eliminates the need for a large capital investment in on-site hardware and maintenance."
http://www.healthfrontier.com/rhms.php
How many other companies provide home ECG monitoring which report over the web? I'm looking but having a hard time finding more. I will update this post as I do.
[UPDATE] Other Home-based ECG monitoring services:
Medtronic CareLink: http://www.medtronic.com/your-health/heart-failure/device/ca...
[UPDATE] A more complete listing: http://www.medcompare.com/matrix/1475/Outpatient-Cardiac-Mon...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ec2 is fine here. All systems have downtime. Its not having a backup system in place that's the problem.
Cardiac monitoring systems DO NOT have downtime believe it or not.