FEATURED
STUDY:
THE SITUATION
The computer network infrastructure that helps the 450 end-users at Harbor Health Services provide assistance to their patients had reached the point where the hardware needed to be replaced. As the organization also planned to add two new software systems, Ken Fudge, Director of Information Technology, realized he needed to upgrade and increase the computing power.
“We were about to deploy a new practice management system as well as a new document scanning system to compliment our electronic medical record system,” said Fudge. “These initiatives were part of a plan to transition into a paperless office. But the existing servers we had could not handle the computing demand efficiently for file saving and file access.”
As a non-profit company, Harbor Health Services also needed to consider a solution that would allow it to cut costs over the long-term. “We were prepared to make a sizable initial investment,” Fudge said. “But we wanted to start recouping our expenditures in the second year so that within three years the systems will have more than paid for themselves.”
THE SOLUTION
The first component of the solution that Fudge assessed involved storage. “We realized that converting our network-attached-storage (NAS) architecture to a storage-area-network (SAN) design would make more efficient use of our storage space,” Fudge said. “We decided to deploy the Network Appliance SAN solution offered by NetTeks. It has allowed us to use a more balance approach to assigning space to servers, creating a storage structure that will support our operations for the long term.”
The suggestion for the second component of the overall solution came from NetTeks, a solution provider that had assisted Harbor Health Services with network infrastructure and Microsoft Active Directory projects as well as general IT support. NetTeks recommended Harbor Health Services convert their servers to a virtual infrastructure, which allows businesses to save significantly because it consolidates multiple servers to into one physical server.
“NetTeks recommended VMware for our virtualization platform,” Fudge said. “Through conversations and a performance review of our infrastructure, we realized we could consolidate as many as six to eight servers into one.”
Once Harbor Health Services decided on the SAN and virtual architecture solutions, it then performed a due diligence review with solution providers to determine which company would deploy the solutions. The organization reviewed proposals from NetTeks as well as EMC and IBM.
“We chose NetTeks because we felt more comfortable working with them, which came as a result of the success we had with NetTeks on previous projects,” Fudge said. “NetTeks did not try to pressure us into a decision, and we had confidence in their abilities, so we knew the project would go well.”
Fudge said the deployment by NetTeks went very smoothly. “The solution carried a lot of risk in that the first system we migrated to the virtual platform was our accounting system. But NetTeks handled the deployment flawlessly.”
NetTeks brought-in a roll server to set-up the virtual environment then visited Harbor Health Services on a Sunday to migrate the new platform to one of the new servers. When the employees came to work that Monday morning, they had no idea anything had happened. “That’s exactly the way we wanted it,” Fudge said. “Everyone kept working just as they normally would even though we undertook a major operating system environment migration.”
Fudge added that very few surprises happened throughout the project, but when they did occur, NetTeks worked so efficiently, the surprises did not cause any pain. “In the end, it turned out that the migration project really wasn’t a risk at all,” Fudge said.
The success of the VMware and NetApp deployments by NetTeks now has Harbor Health Services considering a new disaster recovery plan. “A virtual infrastructure with SAN storage makes it a lot easier to replicate data to an off-site location,” Fudge said. “And with our limited staff size and the skills NetTeks demonstrated on the initial deployment, we will surely rely on them for help with this solution as well.”
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