Baptist Health: Page 2 of 5

Baptist Health, which has three hospital facilities and 11 additional office locations, got a good deal of help in putting the network together. Engineers from EMC, Brocade, Nortel, and McKesson Corp., a major supplier of health care software and consulting services, collaborated on the project. In addition, it was assisted by KMC Telecom, which provided the dark fiber.

But it still took time and effort to get the infrastructure running smoothly. "You have a plan, and there are examples in the lab, but they don't exactly mirror reality, so we had to improvise in some places," Billingsley says. "At certain points, we had to get down to figuring out the nanometer rates on the fiber."

Now, the hospital system is ready for a "smoking-hole disaster," Billingsley says -- that is, a catastrophic event that leaves nothing but a smoking hole in the ground. [Ed. note: Smoking-Hole Disaster? Wasn't that a Steven Seagal flick?]

Baptist Health uses EMC's Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) synchronous disk mirroring software and TimeFinder local mirroring software to keep up-to-the-second copies of all its data. "The advantage is that because it's real time, I can connect the servers to the storage and be back up in an hour from something major happening," Billingsley says. "It's not just having a disaster-recovery plan in place... it's being able to recover within a specific time period."

Currently, the organization is mirroring about 2 Tbytes from one data center to another. In about a year and a half, Billingsley says, that will increase to 10 Tbytes. The main applications running on its two SANs are McKesson's STAR Patient Care, STAR Financials, and Horizon Clinical Documentation systems -- in other words, the lifeblood of the hospital system.