Planning and Selecting Information Systems ◾ 375
Erasmus’s information systems are large in other ways as well. Its information technology
team supports almost 13,000 personal computers. It has over 70,000 active network points,
including clinical devices. It uses over 300 operational databases, spread over 1000 physical
and virtual servers, and supporting 500 distinct applications.
e big change that aected their storage needs, aside from steady and predictable
growth, was a change in the type of data being stored. “A long time ago we only had
text-based IT, so no multimedia was stored, but in the last ten years that has changed,”
explains IT director Nico Drost (Hewlett-Packard, 2014). Genome records, stored as
images, are just one exa ...