EMC VPLEX Brings Life to Northern Hospital’s Private Cloud

EMC Corporation announced
that Northern Hospital of Surry
County, a community hospital in Mount Airy, N.C. with more than 850
physicians and healthcare professionals, is utilizing EMC VPLEX Metro to
transform its data center operations and implement a private cloud.

EMC VPLEX enables information in the cloud, public,
private or hybrid, to be shared, accessed and moved within, across and between
data centers, federating various storage systems into a single resource.
Northern Hospital has shifted operations into a new
data center that automatically rebalances virtual server and storage resources
between the older and newer sites for redundancy – increasing server
utilization in an IT environment that will soon be 100% virtualized. In
addition, Northern Hospital has redesigned its data protection infrastructure
using EMC
RecoverPoint, EMC
NetWorker and EMC Avamar.

Customer Benefits:

• Eliminated Downtime – Using VPLEX Metro, Northern Hospital was able to
  move more than 100 virtual machines, along with applications and storage to its
  new data center without disrupting clinical and
  administrative operations, avoiding an estimated 50 hours of downtime.
• Increased Efficiency – Available RAM increased from 33% to 71% resulting in
  increased redundancy, improved server performance and a savings $25,000 in
  server memory upgrades alone.
• Reduced Costs – By moving to a private cloud and utilizing physical servers
  and storage systems as a virtualized shared resource, Northern Hospital was
  able to eliminate more than 100 physical servers, saving thousands of dollars
  in energy and maintenance costs annually.
• Improved Data Protection – Using a RecoverPoint, NetWorker and Avamar,
  Northern Hospital condensed its backup window timing by 98% – reducing a
  24-hour process to approximately 30 minutes, while accelerating recovery times
  from hours to minutes with zero data loss, a critical requirement for a
  healthcare organization.

Seeking to achieve efficiency, agility and data protection, Northern
Hospital virtualized 90% of its server infrastructure using EMC unified storage
and VMware vSphere solutions. It also needed a way to dynamically move virtual
machines, applications and data between data centers without disrupting critical
applications as it continued its data center transformation and journey to the
cloud. Northern Hospital chose EMC VPLEX Metro for information mobility, EMC
RecoverPoint for replication, and VMware Site Recovery Manager and VMware
vMotion solutions to move its entire physical and virtual server
infrastructure.

"Other offerings we considered
required shutting down our virtualized server infrastructure and some of our
hospital’s most critical applications – that would have potentially meant 50
hours of downtime," said Robert Hall, Northern Hospital’s CIO. "We chose EMC VPLEX to migrate over 100
virtual machines, along with applications and storage to our new data center – with
less-than one minute of downtime. VPLEX took a lot of pressure off our team so
we could achieve this complex move and not worry about interrupting patient
care."

Northern is currently using VPLEX Metro to balance the workload its virtualized
server and storage infrastructure between its production site and disaster
recovery sites. Northern is also constructing a new disaster recovery
environment nearby.

"Now that we offload some of our
production operations to our DR site, we’re only using 25% of our server memory
resources compared to 67% before," said Hall. "Not only did we boost server performance and
avoid $25,000 in memory upgrades but better server efficiency will help us
drive more quickly to 100% virtualization within the next 6 to 12 months. VPLEX
is worth every penny because it’s an incredibly solid and versatile product."

Hall continued: "Our whirlwind
journey to cloud computing has been accelerated by EMC’s deep cloud expertise
and excellent integration between EMC and VMware solutions. We now have an
agile and resilient environment that aligns with the changing needs of the
hospital. The ease of growing and taking care of our systems has transformed
the way we manage our IT assets. And we’ve already eliminated over 100 physical
machines, which is saving us thousands of dollars in maintenance, power and
cooling costs."

For disaster recovery, Northern Hospital replicates its server and storage
infrastructures with EMC RecoverPoint and VMware Site Recovery Manager. The
hospital also replaced a Bridgehead tape backup solution with an EMC NetWorker
solution certified for Meditech and an EMC Avamar deduplication backup system
to address growing backup windows and accelerate recovery times.

"RecoverPoint is so granular that we
can identify a recovery point right up to the minute before a loss or
corruption occurs. In this way, we’re able to ensure compliance with
requirement for guaranteed zero data loss," said Hall. "In our tape environment, we were approaching
a 24-hour backup window for Meditech and our other applications were pushing 14
hours. Restoring from tape was done off-site and could take anywhere from 2-3
hours for a small application and 24-36 hours for Meditech. Now with NetWorker
and Avamar, we can backup Meditech in about 1 hour and everything else in 30-40
minutes. We can also restore any of the applications ourselves in 10-15
minutes."