Crash cart

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A crash cart or code cart (crash trolley in UK medical jargon) is a set of trays on a wheeled cart that is used in hospital wards and emergency rooms. It contains all the basic equipment necessary to follow ACLS/ALS protocols and potentially save someone's life.

A crash cart typically contains a defibrillator and intravenous medications (such as epinephrine and atropine), plus a variety of medical supplies such as latex gloves and alcohol swabs.

Hospitals typically have internal intercom codes used for situations when someone has suffered a cardiac arrest or a similar potentially fatal condition outside of the emergency room (where such conditions already happen frequently and do not require special announcements). When such codes are given, hospital staff and volunteers are expected to clear the corridors, and to direct visitors to stand aside as the crash cart and a team of physicians and nurses may come through at any moment (see Code Blue).

In the software industry, the term crash cart is used, by analogy to its original meaning in medicine, to mean a cart that can be connected to a server that is malfunctioning so badly that remote access to it is impossible, the intention being to "resuscitate" the server to the point where remote administration works again. Crash carts most commonly include a keyboard, mouse, and monitor, because most servers in a modern high-density environment don't have user input/output devices.

It is also possible that the phrase, as applied to computing, was coined independently from its usage in a medical context. The term "crash" has long been used to describe computer systems failures which require or placement of a computer monitor, keyboard and other peripherals on a rolling "cart" leads rather obviously to the resulting phrase.

Crash carts are a method of last resort in data centers which employ various forms of out-of-band management. In those cases it's used for equipment which doesn't support the requisite OOBI features or in cases where the OOBI devices (concentrators, switches, terminal servers, etc) or services themselves have failed.