St.Vincent Indianapolis Hospital

Success Story

Large health care provider reduces storage management costs by 50 percent with
Novell NetWare 6.5

Overview

St.Vincent Indianapolis Hospital is part of St.Vincent Health, the largest health care provider in Indiana. St.Vincent is also part of Ascension Health, the largest Catholic and nonprofit health care system in the United States. Based in St. Louis, Missouri, Ascension Health includes 67 acute care hospitals in 20 states and employs more than 100,000 associates.

Challenge

As in any health care organization, system reliability is critical for hospital staff and physicians providing 24/7 patient care. Even scheduled system outages for maintenance are disruptive. St.Vincent Indianapolis Hospital needed a reliable clustering solution to ensure business continuity for its 8,000 users across 80 facilities.

The hospital was also facing skyrocketing storage management costs while struggling to keep up with exploding storage needs. Many of its servers house several terabytes of data. Keeping its IT staff trained on its complex storage solution was also a challenge, and caused delays when problems arose and only a small number of staff knew how to fix them. The hospital needed a cost-effective and simplified storage management solution across its enterprise.

Novell solution

"With iSCSI support in Novell NetWare 6.5, we can create a robust storage management solution at half the cost. Novell is keeping up with the latest technology which translates into tremendous cost savings for us."

Doug Boval
Systems Engineer
St.Vincent Indianapolis Hospital

St.Vincent Indianapolis Hospital selected Novell NetWare 6.5 with Novell eDirectory and Novell Cluster Services to enhance business continuity and provide a cost-effective storage management solution. The hospital was also interested in NetWare 6.5 for its browser-based management, as well as support for open source technologies and Web services.

"Business continuity is a must-have for us to ensure access to vital information with absolutely no downtime," said Doug Boval, systems engineer at St.Vincent Indianapolis Hospital. "With Novell Cluster Services, we get peace of mind that our systems will remain up and running, and our users are confident that their information will always be available."

The hospital used Novell Cluster Services to set up a four-node cluster to support its network environment. If one network server in the cluster fails, other server nodes in the cluster automatically take over the failed node's responsibility, guaranteeing continuous, uninterrupted system operation.

"With any IT infrastructure, periodic system failures are inevitable," said Boval. "With Novell Cluster Services, we can provide continuous uptime for hospital staff and physicians. We also don't get emergency pages at night and can now have peaceful weekends."

Business continuity allows the hospital IT staff to continuously maintain its servers, minimizing scheduled outages. Novell Cluster Services is also easy to set up and administer, reducing both the complexities of disaster recovery and the amount of training required to keep the IT staff ready to solve any problems.

NetWare 6.5 supports iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface), a standard storage protocol, which allows the hospital to create a storage area network (SAN) solution with a standard Ethernet IP network, rather than expensive Fibre Channel switches and connections. The hospital can also use off-the-shelf servers as opposed to expensive SAN solutions. By dramatically reducing its hardware costs, the hospital expects to cut its storage management costs in half.

"With iSCSI support in Novell NetWare 6.5, we can create a robust storage management solution at half the cost," said Boval. "Novell is keeping up with the latest technology which translates into tremendous cost savings for us."

Other capabilities in NetWare 6.5 have simplified administrative tasks for the hospital. With iManager, IT administrators have browser-based management for network administration from a central location. Support for open source technologies in NetWare 6.5 gives the hospital more options to create portable applications for its mixed environment of NetWare, Windows 2000, UNIX and Sun Solaris.

The hospital also plans to use the Novell exteNd Application Server included in NetWare 6.5 to create Web services for many of its databases and mainframe applications. Providing a Web interface to many "green screen" applications will greatly improve application ease of use and employee productivity.

"NetWare 6.5 offers us significant benefits over a Microsoft solution," said Boval. "With support for open source technologies and Web services, we have a robust development platform to support a mixed environment and extend the life of our legacy applications."

Results

With Novell Cluster Services, St.Vincent Indianapolis Hospital can provide continuous uptime for its 8,000 staff and physicians in 80 offices, which is critical to support 24/7 patient care. The iSCSI support in NetWare 6.5 allows the hospital to use Ethernet, rather than Fibre Channel, to create a cost-effective SAN solution, simplifying administration and reducing storage costs by 50 percent.

"Because Novell keeps up with the latest technology, we don't have to hunt down different products to get the solution we need," said Boval. "With an integrated solution that works well together, we avoid a hodgepodge environment. Novell develops the products that customers really want."