background: drugs play a strategic role as a health commodity. thus, the supply chain management of drugs is an important issue to reducing costs and thereby improving patient health. objective: this study evaluated the status of drug supply chain management and health reform in the pharmaceutical sector of teaching hospitals in ahvaz, iran. methods: this cross-sectional study was carried out i...

thesaurus is one, out of many, precious tool in information technology by which information specialists can optimize storage and retrieval of documents in scientific databases and on the web. in recent years, there has been a shift from thesaurus to ontology by downgrading thesaurus in favor of ontology. it is because thesaurus cannot meet the needs of information management because it cannot c...

Data-centric services, such as transaction processing systems and search-engines, sustain the demands of millions of users each day. These services rely heavily on the I/O subsystem for their data storage and processing requirements. Technological improvements in hard disk drive densities and data-rates have been key enablers in the realization of these storage systems. However, server storage ...

With the emergence of cloud computing, many organizations have moved their data to the cloud in order to provide scalable, reliable and high available services. As these services mainly rely on geographically-distributed data replication to guarantee good performance and high availability, consistency comes into question. The CAP theorem discusses tradeoffs between consistency, availability, an...

This thesis investigates the application of autonomic management to a distributed storage system. Effects on performance and resource consumption were measured in experiments, which were carried out in a local area test-bed. The experiments were conducted with components of one specific distributed storage system, but seek to be applicable to a wide range of such systems, in particular those ex...

Expanded storage is offered as a relatively inexpensive way of using high speed processor storage to minimize I/O operations. Under many circumstances, expanded storage achieves this objective. In some situations, the expanded storage algorithms may not yield the expected benefits. In a few situations, expanded storage can cause severe performance problems. This paper describes the concepts and...

The availability of storagemedia with high capacity at low prices has recently increased the demand for software applications that are able to analyze large data volumes. Engineers build large-scale storage systems using both scale-up and scale-out techniques. Scale-up increases the amount of data a single nodes stores, whereas scale-out aggregates the capacity of several servers and increases ...

Caching is a classical but effective way to improve system performance. To improve system performance, servers, such as database servers and storage servers, contain significant amounts of memory that act as a fast cache. Meanwhile, as new storage devices such as flash-based solid state drives (SSDs) are added to storage systems over time, using the memory cache is not the only way to improve s...

Emerging nonvolatile memory technologies (NVRAM) offer an alternative to disk that is persistent, provides read latency similar to DRAM, and is byte-addressable. Such NVRAMs could revolutionize online transaction processing (OLTP), which today must employ sophisticated optimizations with substantial software overheads to overcome the long latency and poor random access performance of disk. Neve...

In this paper, we consider a class of sensor networks where the data is not required in real-time by an observer; for example, a sensor network monitoring a scientific phenomenon for later play back and analysis. In such networks, the data must be stored in the network. Thus, in addition to battery power, storage is a primary resource: the useful lifetime of the network is constrained by its ab...