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.
Community Hospitals' other two facilities -- its East and South Indianapolis campuses -- are at different stages of project completion. But Copple has been running into resistance throughout the process. "The toughest one to crack ... is getting physicians to do their documentation online. They do not like change," he said.
Other than employee pushback, Copple said, one of the biggest challenges he has faced in rolling out the electronic systems has been with data storage. His midtier storage systems from IBM were continually plagued with disk failures and other events, and his FAStT-700 disk arrays had "major reliability issues."
"It was always something with them," Copple said. "We had some serious troubles with FAStTs not staying up. We'd be the first in the country to hit one of their bugs in their hardware. It was to the point where it brought us down several times for lengthy periods of time."
Copple switched out the disk arrays for two IBM Enterprise Storage Servers, also known as Sharks. Copple said he has had no problems with the hardware since it went online in June. He has also since virtualized the disk arrays in those boxes with software from DataCore. The virtualization technology not only pools disk capacity but allows him to provision on the fly and manage his two storage arrays through a single interface. Instead of monitoring its own fiber-optic network, however, Community Hospitals chose to use a service provider, CentrePath Inc. in Waltham, Mass.
CentrePath's Magellan Management Services have already detected a downed link down to the hospital, apparently caused by a squirrel chewing through a fiber-optic line on a telephone pole.
"It's a redundant ring, so they just rerouted to the other side," Copple said. "They're also at our disposal if we need to add another link or change our configuration. They're kind of our architects still that we can call on and ask if this is right."
Copple expects the project to be completed over the next two years. At that point, the hospital will be backing up 400 Intel-based and 15 AIX servers to a tape library from Storage Technology Corp. in the main downtown data center. In order to ensure that data is not corrupted, he's looking at continuous data protection (CDP) products that will replicate each change to an application at the byte level.
Copple said he was driven to use CDP by a "disaster" earlier this year where the hospital's admit-discharge-transfer system sent corrupted data to the database at the backup facility. "The corruption followed the replicated database so that both sides were corrupted," he said. "Now we're looking at a snap [recovery plan] so we can get back at least four hours."