back to article Hospital IT melts in heatwave, leaving doctors without patient records

Doctors at Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, one of the UK's largest healthcare organizations, were this week left unable to access patient records and forced to cancel appointments following an IT outage caused by the extreme heatwave. Reports suggest both the trust's datacenters suffered outages as Britain hit …

  1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

    New software solves this ?

    Presumably the new software they are buying is so much more efficient that it will use less CPU and so the data center will run cooler

    1. gotes

      Re: New software solves this ?

      Or it's so crap nobody will want to use it.

    2. DevOpsTimothyC
      Trollface

      Re: New software solves this ?

      Perhaps it will only run in the cloud and so they won't have any on-prem hardware to cool....

      1. katrinab Silver badge
        Paris Hilton

        Re: New software solves this ?

        But weren't the "cloud" data centres also having problems with the heat?

        1. ITMA Silver badge

          Re: New software solves this ?

          "clouds" are not an issue since heat waves are the result of high pressure regions leaving the skies pretty devoid of clouds. ;)

          Perhaps that is why the data centres failed - clouds driven off by the high presure LOL

    3. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      Re: New software solves this ?

      Yeah, that struck me too where the article said "The outage came after the trust board was warned months ago of the risk of running legacy systems." and I thought, how does legacy software relate to the cooling systems not being able to handle the conditions? Running legacy software doen;t mean they are still running on hot-running P75 servers. They may be, but nothing in the article indicates what hardware is running in the data centres.

      1. Judge Mental

        Re: New software solves this ?

        Legacy systems, in my experience they're very likely running on old kit due to failure to invest properly.

  2. elsergiovolador Silver badge

    Legacy system

    What a weasel word it is.

    I mean you could consider IRC as legacy system and you can be sure, replacing it with shiny new Teams would cause your systems (and users) a meltdown.

    1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

      Re: Legacy system

      It becomes a legacy system as soon as it is used .....

    2. sanmigueelbeer
      Coat

      Re: Legacy system

      `tis OK. The fax machine still works.

  3. Johndoe132

    In the same way that IP v4 is now legacy?

  4. ITMA Silver badge
    Devil

    How is this the fault of "Legacy Systems"?

    There is something I don't get.

    Perhaps someone can enlighten me.

    The aircon system in a data centre breaks down casuing temperatures to rise and - presumably - IT equipement to either start shutting down or failing.

    So HOW is this the fault of "legacy IT systems"?

    Unles one is counting the HVAC as a "legacy IT system".

    The failure was the HVAC and, by extension - unless they run their own data centre, which I doubt (if anyone knows please do tell) - the mob who run the data centre for failing to either maintain the HVAC or have adequate backup HVAC provision.

    Not the IT. The IT failing was a symptom caused by the HVAC not working.

    1. Hogbert

      Re: How is this the fault of "Legacy Systems"?

      I suspect the problem with the legacy software could be lapsed support and the inability to run up duplicate installs on new hardware or virtual hosts, in a different location.

      The software itself was likely still doing it's job, tho probably only to the minimal original specifications from way back when it was purchased.

      1. ITMA Silver badge

        Re: How is this the fault of "Legacy Systems"?

        Very true.

        Harder to have a working DR plan if it depends on equally old, out of support/warranty hardware and software to work. And when was it last tested?

        Having said that, where the hell was the data centre's EOPs (Emergancy Operating Procedures) to deal with the failure of critical HVAC equipment. And for it to happen at TWO data centres?

        Someone seriously took their eye of both balls so should, arguably, lose theirs (metaphorically speaking as I'm sure gender is and should be irrelevant in efficiently running data centres).

        1. EnviableOne

          Re: How is this the fault of "Legacy Systems"?

          The NHS dont pay for that, theirs board bonuses to think about

  5. Judge Mental

    NoHS IT

    BCPs don't mitigate for poor planning.

    What are the odds on both data centres failing on the same day? Most DCs are built to cope with heat greater than 40C.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Big new projects…

    …have so many promises that as soon as the procurement process starts all other systems including HVAC, servers, storage, desktops and applications cannot attract even minimal maintenance investment. This is not the fault of the staff, their managers or the vendors they work with, but a natural result of how the funding works.

    1. Herring` Silver badge

      Re: Big new projects…

      Indeed. And this exists in the private sector, possibly just as much. Instead of fixing what is causing trouble to the people trying to do stuff, let's have a massive project to do something unrelated.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Funny

    I seem to remember various Tory ministers spouting on about how "technology" could bring massive "efficiency savings" in the NHS. No word about how much it would cost to get the tech they already have into a serviceable state.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The legacy system responsible dates from 1974

    and is the oil/fossil fuel industry since its decision to conceal, deny, obfuscate and impede action on its understanding yesterday it was causing planetwide heating.

    Some chilling should be applied around there.

    BTW last November there were a still few things going on to tax hospitals, and a change of clinical software would have been nastier than usual.

  9. Richard Pennington 1
    Facepalm

    In the old days

    In the old days, the hospital would take the patient's temperature. Now...

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