Wednesday, April 25, 2007

OOPS....We had a little downtime today...



Fortunately, I'm on vacation this week, and I didn't have to deal with the joys brought about by downtime. According to Dalai's First Law of PACS, "PACS IS the Radiology Department," and so when PACS is down, the department is down, and the patients can just cool their jets (or their hemorrhages, or whatever) until it's back. The good news is that the rads can go on a prolonged coffee break if there isn't any way to get back up again.

I don't know all the details at this point, but I do know that our newly-upgraded Impax 6.2.1.135 went down from 8AM until 10AM today. Not the best time for that to happen, if there is a good time. We are assured by our vendor, however, that the same problem will not occur again (any time soon, I assume). I find the whole situation sort of confusing, because we have three parallel production servers, and I don't really understand what took them all down at once. Maybe the Oracle is at it again?

Since the upgrade was fresh, no one thought there would be any problem of this magnitude this soon (about 52 hours after completion), and so the backup plan wasn't fully on-line. Now, we do have a test server, which was used during the upgrade itself, but I guess the scanners weren't still pointing to it. We actually had to use the venerable old (gasp) Web 1000 to get anything read during the dark age of the downtime. Fortunately, the servers where good old Web 1000 live haven't been wiped as yet; I think they are going to be converted to Impax 6 servers eventually.

Well, we survived, and we are stronger for it. Can't wait for the next episode of "As the PACS Turns (Off)".

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