On Wed, 27 Nov 2002, Bohdan Tashchuk wrote:
Dr. John Halamka, the former emergency-room physician who runs Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center's gigantic computer network.
Is a physician, after years of medical school, internship, residency, etc. the right person to be in charge of a "gigantic" computer network? Are arteries and veins the equivalent of fiber and CAT-5?
Do a Google search on John Halamka. http://www.hms.harvard.edu/office/halamka.html I suspect he knows more about networks than several posters on this topic. Nevertheless, it does show that "stuff happens." I am a bit surprised it took three days to fix things, but it wouldn't be unprecedented. Learning how to diagnose problems is hard for both doctors and engineers. Even more difficult is teaching people how to design networks for failures. Unfortunately, many high availability designs make it more difficult to diagnose and fix problems. Sometimes you are better off with a simplier design which fails in simple ways.