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HP, JJWild, and MEDITECH enable Augusta Medical Center to improve the overall health of its local communities

Augusta Medical Center (AMC) is a 255-bed community hospital, located in Fishersville, Virginia, serving Staunton, Waynesboro and Augusta counties, as well as other locations encompassing the Shenandoah Valley. Its mission is to improve the overall health of the communities by assuring access to services that provide or coordinate integrated, comprehensive medical care.

AMC is committed to the highest standards of clinical excellence and is certified by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospitals Organization (JCAHO), a private, voluntary, not-for-profit organization which establishes standards for the operation of health facilities and services, conducts surveys, and awards accreditation.

Diagnosing IT ailments

Since 1990, AMC has relied on core healthcare business applications from Medical Information Technology, Inc. (MEDITECH) and a couple of years ago it elected to migrate to the latest version of MEDITECH's highly integrated Health Care Information System (HCIS) Client/Server application suite. The HCIS handles the entire information flow, from admissions to emergency room, to financials, to storage in electronic medical records, etc. Witnessing a decline in service provided by its legacy systems vendor, AMC also decided to search for another hardware provider to support the new environment.

Marty Morehouse, Director of Information Systems, recounted, "Working closely with JJWild, our systems integrator for HCIS, we had to select a hardware infrastructure that best suited our need for a comprehensive solution encompassing servers and storage, which would be highly available and enable disaster recovery."

To be in compliance, JCAHO requires that hospitals have a well-documented disaster recovery plan. Brian Rock, AMC's Operations Coordinator, noted, "With regard to disaster recovery options we had to assess the cost/risk ratio and meet JCAHO's criteria. While weather-wise we're not in a highly vulnerable area, fire and water damage is the most likely disaster that AMC faces."

Morehouse reflected, "We placed emphasis on finding a new storage architecture because in our legacy infrastructure the disks were directly attached to servers and we had experienced scalability issues with some of them, and under utilization with others."

Finding the right prescription

JJWild facilitated the vendor evaluation process for AMC. Morehouse recalled, "Of the three primary vendors that could deliver solutions to fulfill our requirements we liked HP best because HP's storage area network (SAN) architecture was the most robust and advanced. In addition, the evaluation showed the longevity of HP's solid reputation."

AMC also aligned with HP's Adaptive Enterprise strategy, which embraces integrated virtualization of servers and storage to enable resource sharing across applications and functions to automatically and optimally meet service level agreements. This approach helped AMC decide upon the implementation of SANs at both the main data center and the disaster recovery site. JJWild recommended that an HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array 5000 (EVA5000) be deployed in each location, with HP OpenView Continuous Access (CA) installed for uninterrupted mirroring of data between the sites.

The HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array 5000 is a low-cost, high-capacity, top-performing multi-port virtual disk array that delivers exceptional uptime and availability. It is designed to be highly scalable, and possesses instantaneous replication capabilities and simplified administration. CA virtualizes storage capacity in a single array with built-in intelligence to handle all I/O requests and data replication from one EVA to another, between the data centers.

Morehouse noted, "The HP SAN, with EVA and CA solutions, offered us an ideal and affordable level of redundancy. We also liked the future direction of these products too."

For its server infrastructure AMC selected the Intel-based HP ProLiant server series. Rock said, "We have close to 75 HP ProLiant servers, mostly DL360 and DL380 models, that are connected via Fibre Channel to the SAN. Although HP's servers are proven to be highly reliable, we also have contracted with HP Services for a four-hour break/fix support service to be delivered by local HP experts."

Implementation of the new infrastructure started in June 2002. Morehouse recalled, "JJWild aided with the implementation and its expertise with MEDITECH's HCIS helped us to be very productive in the deployment of the servers and storage."

Rock observed, "Our primary HP SAN now hosts around seven terabytes of data, CA is mirroring whatever clinical data is stored on our primary SAN, to our disaster recovery SAN, which now has close to four terabytes of data. Having an exact copy of the clinical databases in a secondary location to the primary computer room gives us plenty of protection from the risk of a disaster."

Enjoying a healthy solution

AMC has already found the EVA devices to be of very high quality and more reliable than the legacy storage devices. Even more importantly, they have enabled much greater IT flexibility. Morehouse noted, "The HP SANs have allowed us to aggregate the storage and swiftly allocate it to different systems on an as needed basis. We can assign extra megabytes to the application servers that need scaling because we have the capacity available and the ability to share it."

Rock concurred, "The flexibility of EVA makes it faster to deploy a server and allocate space to it. In addition, the EVA and CA combination reduces network traffic enabling users to experience excellent performance."

Morehouse stated, "EVA also reduces the cost associated with implementing change by being much simpler to operate than the legacy storage systems. It enables the allocation of storage more simply where it's needed, more quickly."

Rock agreed, "Administrators only have to look in one place to see the status of the entire storage infrastructure instead of having to go to each server and observe a dedicated array. This has afforded a 60 percent reduction in management effort."

The performance of the entire new HP environment has exceeded expectations. Morehouse said, "We have received positive feedback from the users about the increase in application performance. Even batch jobs have benefited, we have nighttime processing that used to take up to six hours, which has been reduced to around two."

The storage environment amply meets JCAHO's criteria for disaster recovery. Rock described, "We have configured the storage associated with the MEDITECH applications for RAID 10. It would take a lot to lose our entire database on the primary SAN, however, in the unlikely event this happened, we could route servers to the disaster recovery SAN, and operate normally from the mirrored data."

Morehouse added, "If we didn't have the redundant SAN, we would be looking at having to restore patient data from tape, which can be complex and time consuming, and is far from ideal when people's health is at stake. This solution minimizes the risk of not having patient information immediately available."

He concluded, "This has proven to be an excellent turn-key solution, where JJWild and HP have delivered a comprehensive agile infrastructure, which includes efficient disaster recovery capabilities. I'm very satisfied with the strength of the HP/JJWild/MEDITECH relationships, all of the companies have been great to work with in fulfilling AMC's vision to deliver services that continue to improve the overall health of our patients."

At a glance

• Company: Augusta Medical Center
• Headquarters: Fishersville, Virginia
• Founded: 1994
• Size: 255 beds, over 170 full-time physicians, and 2100 employees
• Telephone: 800-932-0262
• URL: www.augustamed.com
• Primary business: A community hospital serving Staunton, Waynesboro and Augusta County as well as other counties and cities in the Shenandoah Valley.

Challenges

• * Find a hardware partner to better support new business-critical applications environment.
• Enhance high availability and disaster recovery capabilities.
• Meet JCAHO's IT standards for hospital accreditation - with regard to disaster recovery regulations.
• Improve scalability of storage infrastructure.
• Obtain more balanced utilization of storage capacity for applications and servers.

Solution

• Two HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array 5000s (EVA5000).
• HP OpenView Continuous Access (CA).
• 75 HP ProLiant servers - mostly models DL360 and DL380.
• Implementation consulting from JJWild.
• MEDITECH's HCIS application suite.

Results

• Increased infrastructure reliability.
• Enhanced IT agility - can add servers and storage devices easily, without needing to shut down systems.
• Improved performance.
• Reduced operational costs associated with implementing change.
• Decreased administrator effort.
• Met JCAHO's disaster recovery standard for hospital accreditation.
• Reduced risk to patients of not having healthcare data readily available.

This case study was originally published by HP

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