The best backup = no downtime

Health Management Technology, Feb, 2005

El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, CA, is truly the "Hospital of Silicon Valley," where patients experience firsthand electronic medical records, wireless handheld devices and a hospital with 99 percent physician participation in CPOE.

But running high tech 24/7 requires high availability--and permits no downtime. "Even 99 percent uptime is not adequate," says Joe Wagner, CTO of El Camino Hospital, who says the hospital aims for 99.999 percent. Downtime directly affects receivables: Wagner notes that even a few hours of downtime can cost the hospital several hundred thousand dollars.

ECH wanted to guarantee high availability and simultaneously decrease costs by consolidating servers, saving on hardware, software and maintenance. It runs about 150 applications, including PeopleSoft for HR and financials, with 150 servers. In late 2002, ECH turned to VERITAS--its long-time partner for backup products--for high availability solutions.

SAVING THE DATA

Most high-availability solutions are hardware-specific. Because they "double up" hardware and software to provide for failover, they also double the maintenance expense for running applications. But VERITAS Consulting helped ECH implement a many-to-one (many active to one standby) cluster strategy. VERITAS mirrors multiple live applications running on partitions on various servers and enables all of these to fail over to a single cluster or partition. VERITAS is not platform-specific, so it allows an application to fail over dynamically, even to an older server with a different operating system.

"With VERITAS, we have 15 live clusters able to fail over to a single machine," says Wagner. "This means huge savings compared to hardware-based high-availability solutions." Multiple server partitions and domains protect against problems within the data center, a significant factor since ECH is creating an additional data center off the main power grid, but in a non-seismic region. This enables all applications to run, albeit at 50 percent of normal speeds, even if the primary data center is completely shut down.

LONG-TERM SUCCESS

"With VERITAS, we're up all the time. We deliver all applications, to all end-users, all the time," says Wagner. He cites huge savings as well, thanks to VERITAS' enabling of server consolidation, including $1.1 million in hardware, $1.5 million in server hardware, $886,000 in software, and another $380,000 in maintenance. '