Case Study: SteelEye® DataKeeper™ Cluster Edition And Deployment Services Ensures Continuous Availability of Carroll Hospital Center's Electronic Medical Records System

The Company

Carroll Hospital Center is a private, nonprofit medical center with more than 400 physicians on its medical staff representing over 38 medical specialties. Founded by and for its communities, Carroll Hospital Center is governed by a community board of directors whose primary goal is to provide high quality, comprehensive medical services in Carroll County, Maryland.

The Challenge

As the second largest employer in Carroll County, Carroll Hospital Center is committed to providing the highest quality health care for people in the communities it serves. To continue providing superior medical treatment, the organization relies heavily on the availability of its electronic medical records (EMR) system, an application from McKesson called Horizon Patient Folder. With only one primary data processing system, Carroll Hospital Center had long identified the need for a reliable, comprehensive disaster recovery solution to ensure the availability of its EMR system.

In the event of an unplanned system failure or downtime, Scott Livesay of Carroll Hospital Center's network services team estimated a minimum of two to three hours of system downtime before the team could allocate the resources to conduct a manual failover. This lengthy process often required hours and involved secondary SAN mirroring to reconfigure the clients and point to the secondary systems. In the event of extreme system failure, it would potentially require up to six to seven hours before full system availability was restored.