The health care provider began its transformation when it opened its all-digital Indiana Heart Hospital two and a half years ago. Now it wants to move its other three hospitals to digital environments and connect all four hospitals to a main data center in downtown Indianapolis -- an effort that will require consolidating 150 T1 lines onto a fiber ring this year.

"That's really important to us from a disaster recovery point," Copple said in an interview with Computerworld at last week's Storage Networking World conference.

The health care system, with 8,500 employees, is currently expanding the physical infrastructure of its north Indianapolis hospital and plans to have it all digital by 2007. The change will include bedside documentation systems, a picture archiving and communications system, and a physician documentation system.

"We needed as near real time as possible. They wanted 30 minutes or less on a switch-over [in case of an emergency], and the only way to do that is real-time synchronization," Copple said.

Copple is using SANsymphony virtualization software with asynchronous online mirroring from DataCore Software Corp. in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., to replicate data to the downtown disaster recovery site.