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by Debbie Lewis
Published 09/19/2006
When has an IT professional ever been in trouble for doing a successful tape backup?
Never. The problem stems from the downtime caused by the execution of these
daily saves as well as other day-end processes. And for busy hospitals like the
University Medical Center (UMC) in Las Vegas, Nevada, downtime means headaches
for numerous departments, which is why iTera was contacted to implement products
and provide consulting services to reduce their downtime burden.
The Whole Issue is Uptime"The
whole issue is uptime," says Ernie McKinley, director of UMC Information
Services.
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"Our Radiology group had to enter patient information manually during
their third shift because that's the time we do our saves. Even though total
downtime was typically 30 minutes, Radiology experienced one hour of manually
entering patient information for every five minutes that Admissions was offline.
That's six hours!" And it wasn't just Radiology complaining; other clinical
departments were suffering as well.
UMC uses Siemens Medical Solutions'
MedSeries4 software to run many of the hospital's back-office and medical
record-keeping transactions. For nightly processing, users were offline for
approximately 30 minutes, usually between midnight and 1:30 a.m. Some of the
processes causing downtime were daily backups, census data increment, auto
discharge/re-admit, order communication (OC) charge generation, medical records
interfacing, and more.
"We have an extremely busy emergency room,"
McKinley says. "There's a direct correlation between the length of time a system
is down and the difficulties with processing admissions, discharges, and
transfers."
iTera consultants analyzed how UMC was using its systems,
and based on iTera's recommendations, made minor changes to some standard
objects within its MedSeries4 environment. "One suggestion was simply to make a
sequential copy on a particular file that was being locked by users," says
iTera's Vice President Kent McDonald. "With this recommendation alone, we
immediately shaved eight minutes off of UMC's downtime."
Hitting the Two Minute MarkWithin typical
MedSeries4 environments, there's necessary downtime for the end-of-day
processes, scheduled maintenance, monthly reorganization of files, and monthly
saves of the system. Because of this, most MedSeries4 shops are hard-pressed to
achieve much better than 90% uptime, but by implementing iTera's solutions as
well as some recommended process modifications from iTera consultants, a 99.9%
uptime is achievable.
The goal of iTera's technical team was to create a
complete solution to reduce UMC's end-of-day downtime to less than five minutes.
In fact, iTera was so successful that UMC's downtime was reduced to under two
minutes (a month-long record). To get to the two-minute mark, UMC used iTera's
Echo2 High Availability solution to eliminate the save-while-active
checkpoint requirements—and the resulting downtime—normally required
during the save process. In addition, recommendations by iTera consultants
resolved the downtime-causing issues related to the other nightly processes.
With minimal impact and expense, Echo2 High Availability eliminated
or significantly reduced the downtime caused by monthly system saves, IBM OS
upgrades, hardware upgrades, and IBM system migrations, while iTera's Reorganize
While Active product eliminated downtime from file reorganizations.
Since
UMC MedSeries4 users are now able to run with little or no break in their
routine, the hospital is more profitable. Staff and patients are happier as well
because the system is more available.
"While gaining efficiencies within
their day-end processes and implementing iTera's system availability products,
iTera eliminated most downtime and added data recoverability improvements," adds
iTera's Technical Manager, Scott Frame. "We gave UMC complete, easy-to-use
solutions with near point-of-failure recovery should they ever experience some
type of object or system failure."
"Many IT professionals are directly measured by the amount of uptime provided,"
summarizes McDonald. "iTera has solutions that reduce downtime to less than two
minutes per day. That's revolutionary!" About UMC
University Medical Center,
affiliated with the University of Nevada School of Medicine, is the premier
teaching hospital in Nevada. The medical center serves the medical needs of
Southern Nevada and parts of California, Utah, and Arizona as well as the
millions of visitors each year that come to fabulous Las
Vegas.
Debbie Lewis is Marketing Director for
iTera, Inc.,
a leading developer and integrator of high availability and continuous
availability solutions for System i. iTera's products have been implemented at
hundreds of organizations around the world, and the company has spent millions
of dollars developing and perfecting its full range of system availability
solutions. For more information, visit iTera's Web site or call
800.957.4511.
iTera,
Inc.
5250 Wiley Post Way, Suite
500
Salt Lake City, UT
84116
800-957-4511 (USA and
Canada)
801-799-0300 (Other countries)
www.iterainc.com
info@iterainc.com
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