For medical, web-enabled repositories
Brute force computer power is just what doctor ordered
By ARTHUR GASCH
Healthcare InfoTech Contributing Editor
As storage and repository requirements exceed terabyte levels routinely in each large hospital, and access to these repositories has become web-enabled, the question arises as to what sort of computing power exists to provide timely, responsive access to such repositories. Several companies have been working to answer these questions, among them Sun Micro systems, Siemens, and Data General, all hardware suppliers.
Enterprise portals are rapidly becoming the new means for medical enterprises to connect with their suppliers, distributors, employees and in the future, even their patients, using the Internet. A critical aspect in the success of these enterprise portals is the ability to scale to meet user loads never before imagined. Indeed, much of the concern about the emergence of Windows NT has been its perceived lack of scalability. Scalability is important, as it allows an enterprise to start small and scale up as needs change and applications grow.
Progress on this front was announced recently by Sun Microsystems, which made public scalability proof-point benchmark results. Each of the three internal benchmarks was run on a single Sun Enterprise 10000 server, popularly known as Starfire , running the highly robust Solaris Operating Environment software and Sun StorEdge disk subsystems.
In several internal tests performed by Sun on the NetDynamics application server running on a single Starfire server configured with 64 UltraSPARC II 400 MHz CPUs, Sun demonstrated the ability to deliver more than 1,400 HTML-to-database transactions per second to web clients, or the equivalent of more than 120 million transactions per day across the Internet. This should be sufficient for even the largest healthcare enterprises, or even regional networks. Based on current Internet usage estimates, this level of throughput from NetDynamics on a single Starfire server is the equivalent of allowing every Internet user in the world to perform a transaction during the course of the day and still leave the capacity to support the daily transaction load of a typical enterprise portal.
This internal benchmark highlights the scalability and power of server-based Java applications when hosted on the Starfire server. In this n-tier architecture, multiple client Sun workstations hosted by the Starfire server communicated with multiple Netscape Enterprise Web (version 3.6) servers, passing requests through the NetDynamics application server which queried an Oracle8 database server in turn. An advance release of NetDynamics 5 was used in this performance test. The new version of NetDynamics was launched at Sun’s ".com Your Enterprise" event, held in San Francisco earlier this month.
In a related internal database benchmark, Sun also demonstrated support for 128 data warehousing users, each submitting a stream of eight different queries simultaneously against a 300 GB data warehouse using a single Sun Enterprise 10000 server running IBM DB2 Universal Database on the Solaris Operating Environment. The 1,024 queries were completed within 254 minutes on the 64-CPU Starfire server configured with 40 GB of memory and 2.7 TB of Sun StorEdge disk subsystems storage. A run with four concurrent users and 32 queries was completed in 7.35 minutes, showing near-linear scalability.
In a separate DB2 UDB internal scalability test, a single query, performing a full table scan with 8 aggregates was run with 8, 16, 32, 48 and 64 processors on the Starfire system. Again, the resulting query times demonstrated near-linear scalability, by delivering 57 times speedup on the 64-way server. This linear scalability suggests that hospitals can select multi-processor systems with enough processors to implement whatever their processing volume is, with the confidence that there is a growth path to linearly increase throughput as their needs expand.
How does this compare to other suppliers of scalable hardware? Sun’s results delivered 86% of peak theoretical performance, surpassing a 64-CPU Silicon Graphics Origin 2000 by 67% and the new POWER3-based 32-node (64 CPUs) IBM RS6000 SP system by 10%.
This is interesting in light of the Data General demonstration at HIMSS last month of large (terabyte) repository transactions running on DG AViiOn computers under Windows NT. That demonstration, however, did not load the system with 1,000 simultaneous queries. It would have been interesting to see the response time if it had, and to compare it to the Sun results reported above. Clearly the Data General demonstration was not real world, but more typical of medical conference demonstrations, as no one creates a terabyte-size repository to handle queries from one user at a time, as DG demonstrated on the floor at HIMSS.
As terabyte medical repositories are implemented, Sun has demonstrated the tools both to support queries against them and to support those queries over the Internet using web browsers. That is something which Microsoft using NT has yet to demonstrate as conclusively via benchmarks or in public forums.
The Sun Enterprise 10000 server is a symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) server, scalable to 3000 MIPS, 64 400 MHz UltraSPARC II processors with 4 MB secondary cache, 64 GB of memory with 64 I/O channels supporting over 60 TB of on-line storage. It runs the Solaris operating environment software and maintains binary compatibility with the largest base of Unix applications for proven robustness. The server is a high-end extension to the highly successful Sun Enterprise family of servers.
One important feature for medical environments is that the Starfire system can be dynamically partitioned while maintaining a full production environment. This feature, known as Dynamic System Domains, makes Starfire a premier platform for deploying multi-tiered applications on a single server, greatly reducing management complexity and overall cost of ownership. The system features a mainframe-class service processor/console for system monitoring and management. With more than $10.5 billion in annual revenues, Sun can be found in more than 150 countries.
Other companies are working together to support large databases and high transaction systems. Siemens has been a company that over the last year seems to have discovered informatics, and has entering into several business alliances to enhance its information systems capabilities.
The most recent alliance is between Siemens and Oracle, which will make the Oracle 8i appliance available on the Siemens Primergy Server Platform. Siemens intends to manufacture the Oracle8i Appliance (formerly code-named "Raw Iron") on its Primergy line of servers based on Intel Pentium II Xeon processors. This makes Siemens the first major European manufacturer of computer systems to bring the Oracle8i appliance to market.
With the Oracle8i Appliance, Oracle not only will eliminate the cost of the operating system, but also the initial setup costs by integrating all the necessary components into the solution. The Oracle8i Appliance will leverage all the Internet computing features of Oracle8i to simplify administration and management. The software is expected to dramatically lower the cost and complexity of computing and significantly improve performance for customers. The Oracle8i Appliance is a completely integrated database platform solution (based on the Oracle8i Internet database) that combines all the necessary software components, including a slim-line operating system kernel, designed to be sold pre-configured and pre-installed by the hardware vendors.
In the development of Primergy servers, Siemens devoted special attention to high levels of reliability, ease of administration and maintenance, and scalable performance. The main functional groups of the servers are combined in easily accessible modules, and can be replaced without tools. The top model, Primergy 870-40 holds a number of peak values in benchmarking. In mid-February, with a 100 GB database, it achieved the best data throughput score of all the 4-processor systems tested against the TPC-D benchmark.
Oracle is the world’s leading supplier of software for information management, and the world’s second-largest independent software company. It is certainly one of the largest medical database companies. Oracle has annual revenues of over $8.3 billion, and markets products and services in 145 countries worldwide
Meanwhile, the pace of medical IT alliances and mergers doesn’t seem to have slowed any during the last few months. Just last week, the Science Applications International (SAIC) acquisition of Oacis Healthcare (San Rafael, CA) cleared antitrust and looks firm. This will make SAIC even larger. It currently provides healthcare systems and services, supporting more than 750 customer locations worldwide with annual healthcare-related revenues approaching $400 million and 2,250 employees in the health systems business area.
SAIC is the nation’s largest employee-owned research and engineering company, providing information technology and systems integration products and services to government and commercial customers. SAIC scientists and engineers work to solve complex technical problems in healthcare, telecommunications, national security, transportation, energy and the environment. With estimated annual revenues in excess of $4 billion, SAIC and its subsidiaries, including Bellcore (Lincroft, NJ), have more than 35,000 employees at offices in more than 150 cities worldwide.
Judging from the activities of all these companies, the importance of medical information systems has not gone unnoticed by many of the larger, information hardware and software companies.
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