• Benchmarking Drupal on Amazon EC2

    15Mar
    Author: ned Categories: Infrastructure Comments: 2

    drupal_icon1One of the questions we often help clients answer is: which EC2 instance size provides the best performance-per-cost for a given application? I recently did some load testing with a few different sample web configurations, including a “stock” Drupal installation… here are the results:

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  • New HIPAA modifications under the ARRA

    12Mar
    Author: ben Categories: IT Management, Security Comments: 0

    If you haven’t been paying attention, now is a good time to start. The recently passed American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 adds stunning, strict new provisions to the already-stringent federal health care legislation, HIPAA. In particular, the changes include:

    • Serious ramifications for business associates, or organizations that have signed agreements with health care organizations to handle patient data. Business Associates are now directly subject to the HIPAA Privacy and Security rule, and must implement all the safeguards employed by fully covered entities. The agreements themselves must be revised, a significant effort for most medium to large sized health care organizations.
    • New data breach notification requirements. Any protected health information (PHI) that has been compromised (accessed or disclosed, essentially) and is not encrypted must be disclosed to the affected individual and the Department of Health and Human Services. Breaches affecting 500 or more individuals must also be reported to the media.
    • Increased enforcement and auditing abilities. The DHHS will now be required to perform a formal investigation if a HIPAA complaint is received. Penalties for violations are also increased.
    • Accounting for treatment, payment, and health care operations for patients that request it. This might seem innocuous on the surface, but most large health care institutions face significant challenges with understanding full footprint of a patient’s health record. The change will create significant administrative burdens, new technical projects, and serious revisions to policies and procedures within and outside of IT.

    These changes seem to have taken the compliance industry by surprise. Few blogs, even those focused on HIPAA, have any analysis. At the time of this writing, Wikipedia neglects to mention the HITECH Act section of the stimulus package that includes the sweeping changes (only a vague $19 billion reference to “health information technology”). This article covers the changes in some detail. In depth analysis here.

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  • Head in the Clouds at BLUG

    04Mar
    Author: ned Categories: Infrastructure Comments: 0

    I’m really looking forward to speaking at next week’s Boulder Linux User’s Group meeting, where I’ll try to cut through some of the marketing hype and provide real-world examples of ways to use “the cloud” in a real production IT department. If you’re a Linux sysadmin in the Boulder area and haven’t yet made it to a BLUG meeting, next Thursday night is a great time to come check it out!

    Here’s the meeting information:

    Our monthly meetings are at 7:00 PM on the second Thursday of each
month at the offices of Aztek Networks., 2477 55th St, Suite 202,
Boulder, CO. A typical meeting consists of an hour-long talk followed
by a raffle for books, and then a question-and-answer period.

    And a little blurb about the talk:

    Cloud Computing for the rest of us: IT Infrastructure on the
Shoulders of Giants

Cloud computing is the new "web 2.0" - everyone's got one.  We'll
focus on Linux-specific infrastructure offerings "in the cloud" and
how you can use them in production today.  By taking advantage of
on-demand, pay-as-you-go Linux servers and related services, you can
save money today while simultaneously increasing performance and
availability.  We will get hands-on during the meeting with Linux
cloud solutions from Amazon and RackSpace.  We'll also take a step
back and look at architectures for scaling Linux services "in the
cloud".

    Hope to see you there!

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