Intermountain Health Care

Success Story

With Novell Branch Office, IHC streamlines management of branch offices with centralized backup and disaster recovery.

Overview

Intermountain Health Care (IHC) is a nonprofit organization based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Selected as the top integrated health care system in the U.S., based on a national study by the SMG Group in 2002, IHC is a leading provider of medical services to those in need. IHC provided $41 million in charity care in more than 123,000 cases during 2002.

Challenge

IHC has 24,000 employees across more than 100 hospitals, clinics and physician offices. While its larger facilities have dedicated IT resources, many of its rural facilities get infrequent visits from IT staff, making it difficult to provide consistent data backup. As a non-profit organization, IHC lacked the budget to invest in expensive new servers and storage media. The organization needed a reliable, cost-effective backup solution at each of its sites to protect critical health care data.

Along with reliable backup, IHC also wanted to improve file access and printing capabilities for each location to improve overall employee productivity.

Novell solution

"With Branch Office, we don't need to worry about replacing our existing hardware or investing in expensive backup media. Novell provides us with an incredibly ingenious and cost-effective disaster recovery solution."

Rob Summers
Enterprise Network Planner and Integrator
Intermountain Health Care

With its maintenance contract for NetWare 6, IHC received free licenses for Novell Branch Office, Novell's new software appliance that intelligently consolidates branch office infrastructure. Novell Branch Office simplifies remote office management, improves employee productivity, and eliminates the need for local backup.

"Data loss is a critical issue for health care, but even low-end backup solutions are expensive," said Rob Summers, enterprise network planner and integrator at Intermountain Health Care. "We were very enthusiastic after seeing the capabilities of Novell Branch Office. It's getting a lot of attention at IHC."

IHC can install an inexpensive Novell Branch Office appliance and get a site up and running in a matter of hours. Novell Branch Office uses rsync, an open source technology, to replicate changes at IHC branch offices to the central office server, eliminating the need for local backup. In the event of a system failure, IHC can quickly rebuild the appliance and restore data from the corporate data center.

"With Novell Branch Office, we don't need to worry about replacing our existing hardware or investing in expensive backup media," said Summers. "Novell provides us with an incredibly ingenious and cost-effective disaster recovery solution."

IHC used the portal services bundled with Novell Branch Office to provide Web-based access to file and print services from branch offices. Employees now have easy access to both personal and shared files from any Web browser or through a mapped drive, as well as Novell iPrint to print locally without going through a print queue at corporate headquarters. Users view the printers in their particular location, and iPrint automatically downloads the correct driver when they select a printer.

"With Novell iPrint, we no longer have to visit machines and set up printer drivers – it's all automatic," said Summers. "This has significantly reduced the number of IT requests for help and made it easy for users to print from any location."

To simplify user administration, Novell Branch Office intelligently communicates with eDirectory and caches user identities at the branch office level, eliminating the need for directory partitions in every office. This consolidation will reduce directory overhead, and gives IHC administrators a fast and seamless way to provision users into the new environment.

"With a centralized directory that automatically authenticates users in branch offices, we expect to significantly reduce our directory administration costs," said Summers.

Results

Novell Branch Office gives IHC a cost-effective backup and disaster recovery solution that eliminates the need for expensive storage media and dramatically reduces hardware costs for remote hospitals, clinics and physician offices. Secure, automatic backup of branch office data to the corporate data center protects critical health care information, and also helps the organization comply with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requirements.

Users in branch offices have improved file access and printing capabilities, increasing productivity and reducing the number of helpdesk calls. Directory consolidation will reduce directory overhead in branch offices and help IHC decrease its administration costs.

"For a non-profit organization, cost is extremely important to us," said Summers. "With Novell Branch Office, we get a centralized backup and disaster recovery solution with little risk, which improves our ability to provide exceptional care to those in need. We love working with Novell technology and see great things ahead for both our companies."