NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital Implements DataCore Software to Achieve Higher Levels of Business Continuity

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., May 1 /PRNewswire/ -- NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, the University Hospital of Columbia and Cornell, has selected and installed DataCore's SANsymphony software to manage its growing storage area network (SAN) complex that serves over 5,000 users and adds an automatic fail- over architecture to eliminate downtime from failures, upgrades and change requests. Data is absolutely critical to hospital operations and patients' well-being, so it must be not only highly available, but safeguarded against catastrophe. Downtime previously incurred by routine tasks, such as maintenance and upgrades also has to be eliminated in order to spare users from the pain of disruption. With this in mind, SANsymphony software was installed to maximize SAN high-availability, add a new level of data protection and to address the need to perform maintenance and upgrade installs without causing downtime.

With DataCore, the hospital has embraced the business continuance benefits of a SAN and gained automatic and real-time synchronous recovery from failures by deploying state-of-the-art triple mirroring technology. SANsymphony adds a new and higher level of data protection and emergency recovery from failures and provides the flexibility to take systems off-line to perform changes and upgrades without disrupting operations. NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital is among the nation's best in patient care, medical education and research. The hospital is affiliated with both Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons and Weill Medical College of Cornell University.

A day in the life before DataCore meant that in order to perform maintenance tasks on their EMC equipment, network administrators had to bring down the storage unit -- in this case a SAN -- in order to accomplish these maintenance objectives. Rather than having to cripple the storage network, every time administrators needed to do maintenance, the hospital wanted a way to perform upgrades without taking the entire operation down. "Because of the effects of down-time, we were not able to efficiently shut down our system before due to the consequences it would have on hosts and users," said Billy Sakatis, Back-office Manager at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. Now, with synchronous mirrors and auto-failover features from DataCore Software, system administrators are able to perform maintenance updates and not take production systems down.

"Having looked at several vendors prior to DataCore, nothing we looked at apart from DataCore was mature enough in terms of features and capabilities," continued Sakatis. "With DataCore, we not only found all the fault-tolerance needs that we wanted, but DataCore can work with anyone else's storage equipment. DataCore's products are feature-rich and have everything that we needed." The goal for NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital was to do disaster recovery between their sites. Presently, two sites are up and running with DataCore.

In the beginning of the engagement, the hospital planned to synchronously mirror locally and then take advantage of AIM to asynchronously mirror to their disaster recovery site. However, during the course of project planning, the NewYork-Presbyterian team developed the capability to go synchronous between their production and disaster recovery site. The hospital will now be able to take advantage of tertiary mirrors to create real-time synchronous disaster recovery capability. Local and remote systems will simply see a mirror copy so complexity is eliminated and each system automatically and instantly access the mirror copies and continue their workloads without any impact or downtime.

"Over the course of the deployment we collaborated with NewYork- Presbyterian system administrators and made some architectural design changes that needed to be made in order to leverage some of the features that DataCore brings to the table," said Ben Treiber, Director of Customer Services, DataCore Software. "With these changes and our software, we will meet the hospital's objective of synchronizing data between the two sites so that New York Presbyterian has synchronous mirror copies of each site's data on the other site." The environment at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital represents a large-scale storage management deployment. The SAN supports the servers that support the entire hospital user community - in this case 5,000 supported users. This is done via a 6-way storage server configuration spread over multiple sites.

The environment supports a large number and variety of IBM AIX, Windows, Netware and Linux server systems. Synchronous mirrors now give system administrators at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital the ability in a disaster situation to be assured that the complete copy of all data at the disaster stricken site has made it to the disaster recovery site. About NewYork Presbyterian Hospital NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital is the largest not-for-profit, non-sectarian hospital in the country. It provides state-of-the-art inpatient, ambulatory, and preventive care in all areas of medicine at five major centers: NewYork- Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital of NewYork-Presbyterian, the Allen Pavilion, and the Westchester Division.

It consistently ranks as one of the top hospitals in the country in U.S. News & World Report's guide to "America's Best Hospitals." The NewYork-Presbyterian Healthcare System-an affiliation of acute-care and community hospitals, long- term care facilities, ambulatory sites, and specialty institutes-serves one in four patients in the New York metropolitan area. http://www.nyp.org

About DataCore Software DataCore Software fundamentally changes the economics of managing storage. DataCore's disk server software easily adds capacity expansion and centralized storage management for Windows, UNIX, Linux, VMware, MacOS, and NetWare systems. DataCore is privately held with corporate headquarters in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. For more information, visit http://www.datacore.com. DataCore, the DataCore logo, SANsymphony, SANmelody, SANmaestro and Powered by DataCore are trademarks or registered trademarks of DataCore Software Corporation. Other DataCore product or service names or logos referenced herein are trademarks of DataCore Software Corporation. All other products, services and company names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.