Upgrade disasters made easy

30.01.2007
I'm the technical administrator at a large medical group in Canada. Among other things, I'm responsible for the LAN, the WAN, all the desktops, laptops, peripherals, and a medical-records application that's at the core of our group's operations. Over the last couple of years, we've been struggling to make that app perform more reliably. At the same time, our infrastructure has been growing fast, and sluggish performance from our overloaded servers had become a problem.

We developed quite a wish list:

-- A two-generation upgrade of the medical records application -- an app that's critical to the health and well-being of our patients;

-- A two-generation upgrade of our revenue-critical Practice Management application;

-- Moving our datacenter from an overcrowded, in-house facility to a third-party hosted center;

-- Installing bigger, faster servers for in-house use;