About HPS Pharmacies
HPS Pharmacies is Australia's leading provider of pharmacy services to private hospitals, aged care and correctional service facilities. It also supplies major private cancer centres throughout the country. Based in Wayville, South Australia, the company employs 350 people at 20 branches across six of the seven Australian states.
Challenge
HPS Pharmacies' day-to-day business relies on its Patient Management and Drug Dispensing application. Each of the company's 20 pharmacies runs a local instance of this application, which communicates with a central instance at the main data centre in Wayville.
"We don't have local IT support at each pharmacy, so in many cases, if we had an IT failure, we had to fly someone out to restore the server," said Steve Frost, Infrastructure Manager at HPS Pharmacies. "This could take up to 24 hours, during which time the local staff would have to keep records manually—so it was a significant cost to the business. Even worse, if the central instance at our main data centre went down, every pharmacy would be affected, which would be disastrous for the business."
After virtualising its IT architecture using VMware ESX, HPS Pharmacies decided to implement a more sophisticated disaster recovery strategy, and began looking for suitable IT solutions.
Novell Solution
Comunet, a Novell Partner that had worked with HPS Pharmacies on the virtualisation project, suggested implementing PlateSpin® Forge and PlateSpin Protect from Novell. Following a successful demonstration of these technologies to IT and business leaders within the organisation, HPS Pharmacies decided to proceed with the implementation, which Comunet completed on schedule and within budget.
PlateSpin Forge is a self-contained disaster recovery hardware appliance capable of protecting up to 25 virtualised environments out of the box. HPS Pharmacies deployed PlateSpin Forge at a secondary location near its Wayville data centre, using a 2Mbit/s fibre optic link between the two sites. The Forge appliance automatically replicates eight virtual and physical server workloads–including the core pharmacy application, Microsoft Exchange e-mail, Citrix, file and fax servers–enabling rapid failover in the event of an outage at the main data centre.
"There are many ways of creating a disaster recovery environment, often involving very complex and expensive technologies," said Frost. "We wanted to keep it simple. The great advantage of PlateSpin Forge is that you just plug it in and it works; it's so easy to use that the training requirements for IT staff are minimal."
HPS Pharmacies configured PlateSpin Forge to replicate all eight server environments every three hours, so that very little data will be lost if there is a problem at the main data centre. The solution also provides an automatic failover function, which will enable the company to bring the main pharmacy application back online within 30 minutes of a failure.
HPS Pharmacies has also deployed PlateSpin Protect at fourteen locations, to improve resilience for local instances of the pharmacy application. Data from each office is replicated every 25 minutes to a local PlateSpin Protect server, and sent overnight to a secondary PlateSpin Protect server located at another office.
Results
PlateSpin Forge has reduced the recovery time for systems at HPS Pharmacies' main data centre from 24 hours to just 30 minutes—a 98 percent improvement. At the local pharmacies, PlateSpin Protect enables individual servers to be recovered quickly, without the need for an on-site visit from technical staff.
"By enabling us to regularly replicate data across different sites, these PlateSpin technologies from Novell have practically eliminated the risk of a catastrophic failure of our IT systems," said Frost. "We are now planning to move the PlateSpin Forge environment to a new data centre in another state, adding a further layer of protection."
Eliminating downtime delivers a real and immediate financial advantage to HPS Pharmacies. Previously, if a single pharmacy's server was offline, staff had to keep records by hand and work overtime to enter the data once the system was back online. By reducing this expenditure on overtime, PlateSpin is potentially helping the company make significant savings.
"We have never experienced a failure in our main data centre, but if we did, and all 20 pharmacies were offline at once, the financial implications would be considerable," said Frost. "By eliminating costly system downtime, the PlateSpin Forge solution paid for itself almost immediately. Based on our experience, other companies should be jumping at the chance to protect their systems using PlateSpin."