Care New England, one of the largest healthcare providers in Rhode Island, will soon embark on a major data center consolidation project that has been almost three years in the making.
Three data centers in separate hospital locations currently provide the processing power for the organization. In May, these will be consolidated onto a single site in Warwick, 10 miles south of Providence.
A massive team of people are working to ensure that all goes to plan with the scheme, which is expected to be completed in August.
Howard Rubin, director of IS technical services at Care New England, says, Theres a lot of other very large projects going on at the moment, but I have a huge team working on this.
This numbers some 200 people, including internal IT staff, Care New England end users, and vendors. And Rubin admits that any scheme on this scale is stressful: I will sleep a lot better in September.
Its not easy to move three data centers for hospitals -- its a question of moving the systems without interrupting the service.