CUSTOMER PROFILE 
As one of the busiest acute care hospitals in the state, this regional medical center offers services in over 50 medical specialties and subspecialties. Its 2,500-plus employees serve over 15,000 patients annually through its emergency care centers, cancer, trauma, cardiac care and other practice areas. The facility has been recognized for consistently delivering high quality care to the communities it serves.
CHALLENGE
To serve the needs of its patients and to meet stringent health care regulations, the hospital maintained a complex technology infrastructure with 150 servers, direct-attached storage, and multiple operating systems. The complexity of the environment made management and administration difficult and time-consuming.
When the need arose to implement two new patient management applications to meet HIPAA regulations, the hospital seized the opportunity to realign its IT infrastructure. Its goal was t0 build a solid storage infrastructure that would support critical application growth and simplify management by decreasing the environment's complexity.
SOLUTION
The hospital turned to Daymark Solutions for assistance in designing a new enterprise storage strategy. Daymark's experts conducted a detailed analysis of the facility's current infrastructure and future requirements, and made recommendations for a scalable solution that would allow new applications to be rolled out faster and more efficiently.
It would also offer long-term cost savings by allowing the IT staff to quickly boost capacity when necessary by adding more disk drives, rather than purchasing additional servers, as they had in the past.
Daymark's extensive knowledge of storage technology was invaluable as the hospital evaluated solutions from several leading manufacturers. The professionals from Daymark offered insight into various products to help the hospital's IT team make educated decisions and streamline the acquisition process. This objective analysis led to a decision to implement a dual fabric Storage Area Network (SAN) and storage array that would meet critical availability and scalability requirements.
With the technology decisions made, Daymark continued to serve as project leader, coordinating engineers from multiple vendors throughout the process. Installation, which had to be completed during a 12-hour window of weekend downtime, went flawlessly, thanks to comprehensive advanced planning by Daymark. Leveraging the new SAN, the roll-out of the new patient management applications went just as smoothly.
Within 30 days of a product decision, a new SAN consisting of two fabric switches and a scalable storage array was in production, supporting the new patient management applications. In addition, detailed project plans were finalized to move existing critical servers that could also benefit from SAN connectivity and scalability.
Today, Daymark continues to be a valuable resource for this medical center, offering ongoing support, knowledge and expertise for all its technology requirements.
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