DH2i DxConsole Selected by Epworth Healthcare

DH2i Company, provider of server application virtualization solutions, announced that Epworth Healthcare, an Australian not-for-profit private healthcare providers, has chosen its DxConsole software solution to help ensure the HA of its mission critical applications, as well as to streamline management and lower the costs associated with its SQL Server environment. 

With over 16TB of data already under management, Epworth has been experiencing growth. Its digital medical record (DMR) system, which has been based at one site for almost three years, is being deployed across all of the Epworth hospital sites. This is and will continue to increase the amount of data being collected. In addition, Epworth entered into a strategic joint venture with an outside medical imaging company, which will enable Epworth to open its own medical imaging services organization. And, it is planning to open a new hospital in Geelong in 2016. To support these three initiatives, it is planning to add well over 10TB of storage in the next year alone. During the new storage and related server deployment, subsequent data migration and ongoing production administration – uninterrupted service availability, management efficiency and cost control are three top priorities.

For its largest most business critical systems, which include its iSOFT Patient Management (IPM) system, BOSSnet Digital Medical Records (DMR) and data-warehousing environment, Epworth selected DxConsole to help it to meet these requirements.

“We chose DxConsole because it will help us to overcome a number of issues we are facing as we evolve our SQL Server infrastructure,” said Lance Ripps, solutions architect and infrastructure team lead, Epworth Healthcare. “First and foremost, we need to ensure the availability of our business critical systems. While we can use VMware HA for some of our smaller less critical applications, it can’t provide the levels of availability we need for our larger mission critical systems. We also want to avoid Microsoft Cluster Services because we feel it is an absolute pain to run in a virtualized environment – makes for a lot of extra work and overhead.”

He continued: “DxConsole will enable us to achieve the high levels of availability we require. Moreover, it will help me to preserve Epworth’s 24×7 operations, without my having to maintain the ridiculously late nights I used to keep as I tried to failover clusters, and do patching on the underlying VMware ESX environment.“

“Another challenge we face is in regard to Microsoft licensing. Prior to DxConsole, we were stuck with enterprise licensing on a per core basis, which is extraordinarily expensive. And, we were concerned about the costly ‘traps’ at the renewal stage. DxConsole will enable us to upgrade our SQL Server infrastructure and take advantage of virtualization from a SQL perspective, at a fraction of the cost,” Ripps stated. 

“Our focus for our data warehousing is around Enterprise version and grunt, from a physical perspective. For BOSSNet and IPM the focus is HA, SAN replication and the ability to manage those instances with as little downtime as possible. So, we needed to get around the SAN and LUN limitations,” Ripps concluded. “This is another reason DxConsole was so attractive to us – because of its ability to create large LUNs to concatenate our storage together.“

Using DxConsole, Epworth is able to create large LUNs, helping them to avoid the maintenance headaches they previously faced in constantly having to create and migrate data to new LUNs. It estimates this will save them over four hours each week, as well as eliminate the need to make an interim storage purchase estimated at over $100,000.

“With DxConsole, Epworth can achieve and maintain uninterrupted availability of business critical services, while greatly simplifying the time and expense it previously dedicated to its underlying SQL infrastructure,” said Don Boxley, CEO and co-founder, DH2i. “Moreover, it will help them to meet its future goals, such as meeting increasingly stringent SLA requirements, SQL Server consolidation, DR planning, and compliance with evolving government regulations.“

Epworth’s Heterogeneous IT Environment
Epworth’s IT infrastructure is currently comprised of two primary datacenters, which support data replication between them in order to ensure HA of both critical and non-critical data. Its primary infrastructure includes HP servers running Windows 2003 – 2008, Hitachi OpenVMS storage, SQL Server databases, and over 300 various applications. The applications are responsible for supporting business services ranging from patient management, electronic prescribing, digital medical records, and cancer treatment to birthing outcome systems; as well as standard business functions such as office collaboration. In addition, the applications include those required to meet government regulatory requirements. Over 6,200 users are supported, comprised of doctors, nurses, scientists and other medical personnel, as well as operations and administration professionals (on-site and external)