NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital Implements DataCore Software to Achieve Higher Levels of Business Continuity
FORT LAUDERDALE - May 1, 2006
- NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, the University Hospital of Columbia
and Cornell, has selected and installed DataCore's SANsymphony software
to manage its growing storage area network (SAN) complex that serves
over 5,000 users and adds an automatic fail-over architecture to
eliminate downtime from failures, upgrades and change requests. Data is
absolutely critical to hospital operations and patients' well-being, so
it must be not only highly available, but safeguarded against
catastrophe. Downtime previously incurred by routine tasks, such as
maintenance and upgrades also has to be eliminated in order to spare
users from the pain of disruption. With this in mind, SANsymphony
software was installed to maximize SAN high-availability, add a new
level of data protection and to address the need to perform maintenance
and upgrade installs without causing downtime. With DataCore, the
hospital has embraced the business continuance benefits of a SAN and
gained automatic and real-time synchronous recovery from failures by
deploying state-of-the-art triple mirroring technology. SANsymphony
adds a new and higher level of data protection and emergency recovery
from failures and provides the flexibility to take systems off-line to
perform changes and upgrades without disrupting operations.
NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital is among the nation's best
in patient care, medical education and research. The hospital is
affiliated with both Columbia University College of Physicians &
Surgeons and Weill Medical College of Cornell University. A day in the
life before DataCore meant that in order to perform maintenance tasks
on their EMC equipment, network administrators had to bring down the
storage unit -- in this case a SAN -- in order to accomplish these
maintenance objectives. Rather than having to cripple the storage
network, every time administrators needed to do maintenance, the
hospital wanted a way to perform upgrades without taking the entire
operation down. "Because of the effects of down-time, we were not able
to efficiently shut down our system before due to the consequences it
would have on hosts and users," said Billy Sakatis, Back-office Manager
at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.
Now, with synchronous mirrors and auto-failover features
from DataCore Software, system administrators are able to perform
maintenance updates and not take production systems down. "Having
looked at several vendors prior to DataCore, nothing we looked at apart
from DataCore was mature enough in terms of features and capabilities,"
continued Sakatis. "With DataCore, we not only found all the
fault-tolerance needs that we wanted, but DataCore can work with anyone
else's storage equipment. DataCore's products are feature-rich and have
everything that we needed."
The goal for NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital was to do
disaster recovery between their sites. Presently, two sites are up and
running with DataCore. In the beginning of the engagement, the hospital
planned to synchronously mirror locally and then take advantage of AIM
to asynchronously mirror to their disaster recovery site. However,
during the course of project planning, the NewYork-Presbyterian team
developed the capability to go synchronous between their production and
disaster recovery site. The hospital will now be able to take advantage
of tertiary mirrors to create real-time synchronous disaster recovery
capability. Local and remote systems will simply see a mirror copy so
complexity is eliminated and each system automatically and instantly
access the mirror copies and continue their workloads without any
impact or downtime
"Over the course of the deployment we collaborated with
NewYork-Presbyterian system administrators and made some architectural
design changes that needed to be made in order to leverage some of the
features that DataCore brings to the table," said Ben Treiber, Director
of Customer Services, DataCore Software. "With these changes and our
software, we will meet the hospital's objective of synchronizing data
between the two sites so that New York Presbyterian has synchronous
mirror copies of each site's data on the other site."
The environment at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital
represents a large-scale storage management deployment. The SAN
supports the servers that support the entire hospital user community -
in this case 5,000 supported users. This is done via a 6-way storage
server configuration spread over multiple sites. The environment
supports a large number and variety of IBM AIX, Windows, Netware and
Linux server systems. Synchronous mirrors now give system
administrators at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital the ability in a
disaster situation to be assured that the complete copy of all data at
the disaster stricken site has made it to the disaster recovery site.
About New York Presbyterian Hospital
NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital is the largest not-for-profit,
non-sectarian hospital in the country. It provides state-of-the-art
inpatient, ambulatory, and preventive care in all areas of medicine at
five major centers: NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University
Medical Center, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical
Center, Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital of NewYork-Presbyterian, the
Allen Pavilion, and the Westchester Division. It consistently ranks as
one of the top hospitals in the country in U.S. News & World
Report's guide to "America's Best Hospitals." The NewYork-Presbyterian
Healthcare System-an affiliation of acute-care and community hospitals,
long-term care facilities, ambulatory sites, and specialty
institutes-serves one in four patients in the New York metropolitan
area.
www.nyp.org
About DataCore Software
DataCore Software fundamentally changes the economics of managing
storage. DataCore's disk server software easily adds capacity expansion
and centralized storage management for Windows, UNIX, Linux, VMware,
MacOS, and NetWare systems. DataCore is privately held with corporate
headquarters in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. For more information, visit
www.datacore.com.
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