Chas Horvath, Director of Software Engineering at Stratus provides a brief history of remote service connectivity, positioning Stratus’ current offerings relative to the industry and outlining why Active Service Network (ASN) connectivity is of increasing strategic importance to Stratus and its customer’s success.  Chas then provides an overview of ASN’s inner workings and operational procedures with an emphasis on security, and in particular articulating how ASNs’ encryption, authentication, and access control policies are compatible with PCI (Payment Card Industry) data security standards.

This guest post is written by Katie Matlack of Software Advice and discusses what ophthalmologists on the lookout for the right ophthalmology EMR solution should keep in mind. You can view the original post this story is based on here.

At Software Advice we hear often from individuals who are looking for an EMR for a particular specialty. We decided it would be useful to go out and interview those within one specialty, Ophthalmology, who had strong opinions on what characteristics were the most important to look for in an EMR solution. I spoke with four ophthalmologists and a practice manager to research this piece. Here are the major takeaways.

1) It’s important that your solution can handle large image files efficiently.

You probably already know that ophthalmologists deal with lots of very high-resolution images of the eye. Since the file sizes for those images can be quite large, without the right solution your image files could slow down the rest of your EMR system. Dr. Dean Calson of Eye Associates of Colorado Springs told me that his system allows him to run his images off a second server, eliminating any possible competition for processing power between his images and the rest of his EMR. Dr. Valla Djafari of the Texas Retina Institute, on the other hand, noted that his Web-based EMR allowed him to use the wireless network of whatever office he was working at to easily access the files he needed. As a more mobile doctor who worked at multiple locations that referred patients to him, he stressed the ease of the Web-based option for its convenience as well.

2) Interconnectivity with eye measurement tools is key.

If your EMR platform can connect directly to your testing equipment, your life will be made a lot easier. Dr. Byron Tabbut of Wheaton Eye Clinic mentioned that having all information available from one source–your EMR–can save you from “having to hunting and pecking all over” for data from various different places.

On the topic of interconnectivity, here’s a useful tip that one ophthalmologist, Dr. Walter Harris of Rittenhouse Eye Associates, shared. It’s related to pricing questions you should keep in mind when speaking with vendors:

“It’s worth the money for a system to be able to intersect with your testing equipment. But different companies will charge differently for this ability; one might offer an unlimited option, while others might charge you per piece of equipment.”

Dr. Harris recommended asking each vendor about the pricing structure of the feature, and also suggested having a list of all your exam equipment in hand when you meet with vendors.

Recently, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer recalled over a million birth control pills due to packaging and visual inspection errors.  The media coverage of the incident was crucial to getting the word out about the possibly-erroneous packs, but it also serves to draw attention to the costly fragility of pharmaceutical processes.

In the time it took to package just 30 birth control packs, they created such a huge reputation disaster that it shook public confidence in the company’s products. Due to the nature of the industry, reputation is critical: patients with heart conditions or blood disorders won’t trust a company to put together the complex chemical configurations creating life-saving drugs if they can’t even count out 28 pills without a problem.

This particular accident wasn’t technology-related, but you can see how a similarly small fault in a pharmaceutical manufacturing server could prove disastrous.  Downtime of traditional high-availability solutions – including Microsoft clusters that fail over to another machine, but completely lose the data from whatever processes were occurring at the time of the fault – is around 8 hours and 46 minutes annually on average.

This begs the question, how many birth control pills do you think Pfizer packages in a full workday? That is the amount of pills that would be affected with “traditional” high availability solutions.

Understanding your plant’s annual downtime and its total cost is critical to finding a solution that best fits your needs. The goal should be to minimize downtime by implementing high availability technologies that work with your existing applications. The simplicity of adaptable high availability solutions add value without adding to the total cost of ownership of your servers and IT headaches that accompany management of new technologies and machines.  Protect your company, products, and brand reputation simply and effectively by doing the research upfront and implementing tools before a fault breaks down plant production. To learn how to calculate the cost of downtime, read our whitepaper  or watch the webinar.

The most business-critical application in your data center could very well be VMware’s vCenter Server.

As you continue to add to the number of virtual machines in your environment, keeping vCenter Server up and running becomes increasingly important. Think about it: If vCenter goes down, IT managers are unable to control their VMs, and tools for site recovery, operations, business management, chargeback processes and more are unavailable.

To increase availability for vCenter, VMware offers a self-described “stopgap” solution known as Heartbeat, a complex-to-configure failover system that requires duplicate servers, duplicate software licenses (for both vCenter and Windows) and a brand-new interface to learn.

For those of you scoring at home, that is twice the license costs, twice the servers, and twice the management headaches.

Our crack engineering team, who often have the same pain points as you and every other IT director around the globe, created a better solution. Simple, lower-cost uptime for vCenter that pro-actively prevents failures instead of reactively managing failovers. All this without any extra licenses, workarounds or custom scripting.

The new Stratus Uptime Appliance for VMware vCenter Server is a plug-and-play solution that provides greater than 99.999% availability. It’s a single server solution that runs one copy of vCenter on one copy of Windows. One bullet-proof server, only one software license, and no complexity. (And, as an added bonus, it costs thousands of dollars less than similarly configured Heartbeat solutions.)Is your vCenter a risky, single point of failure?

Uncomplicate your uptime and check out the new Stratus Uptime Appliance for VMware vCenter. Have a question? Ask it in the comments, or send us a tweet @Stratus4uptime.