American Health Network Adds Datacore Storage Virtualization Software

DataCore Software announced that American Health Network (AHN) has completed the 3rd part of their virtualisation project by adding DataCore storage virtualisation software to their Citrix environment.

The integration has been tested in production and proven failsafe. “The success that people in the IT industry are having with virtualisation speaks for itself,” comments Stuart Donnelson, data centre server manager, American Health Network. “In looking at the technologies we had available to accomplish this project, it was clear to us that Citrix XenServer was the right choice, since our primary concern was to virtualise XenApp systems and provide a secure, highly-available environment for our physicians. And the reason we chose DataCore for our virtual storage infrastructure came at the recommendation of Citrix and DataCore partner, Hogan Consulting Group.”
 
All of the physicians within American Health Network use a centralized medical record known as a EHR (Electronic Health Record) and billing software called NextGen. AHN publishes NextGen and the rest of the company’s production applications through Citrix XenApp – sending these out to AHN’s 80 sites throughout Indiana and Ohio. The focus of American Health Network’s virtualization project was straightforward enough – to modernize their existing Citrix environment.

AHN’s immediate requirements were to replace five-year old servers and in the process, take strategic advantage of server and storage virtualisation software.
 
“We were intrigued by the ability to apply virtualization to our storage and the possibility of getting high-end data protection for the disk farms behind our Citrix infrastructure, without incurring the high costs generally associated with such functions or sacrificing security. If DataCore can save us $100,000 to $200,000 during this modernization, then we have really struck gold,” said Donnelson
 
System Already Fail-safe Tested
DataCore proved particularly vital to AHN’s operations recently when system administrators noticed that AHN lost a major component of their storage infrastructure due to a firmware problems, yet the DataCore software automatically and non-disruptively failed over to its high-availability partner and kept the storage access ‘live’ to application servers. In fact according to Donnelson, “Not a single user or individual even noticed this failure – except for the few, select people in IT who were previously set up to monitor systems and receive such notices. “It was then that we said – this DataCore product is really pretty darn great.”
 
Right now, American Health Network has 1,400 users connected to 55 XenApp servers. They expect to grow to 100 servers by the time they get to the next version of their medical records software.
 
“Importantly, when it comes to XenServer, the core technologies that you are dependent on is the storage and the network,” summarized Donnelson. “Without those two things being very dynamic and flexible, you are essentially back to ground zero.”
 
Donnelson is quick to point out that DataCore has provided American Health Network with a stable and robust environment: “We have been nothing but pleased with DataCore. The DataCore software is rock-solid. We really haven’t had to do anything to it. And to me every time I don’t have to worry about a platform or a piece of technology, I sleep a little better every night.”