LifeLink Foundation needed to provide business continuity and DR of critical transplant related information to multiple locations and needed to manage DR planning and implementation in a hurricane zone. Learn how VMware & Dell EqualLogic worked together to implement two remote sites providing consolidated virtual storage, snapshot-based backup and recovery.
CUSTOMER SUCCESS
COMPANY: LIFELINK FOUNDATION BUILDS VIRTUAL DATA CENTER FOR Community service organization ® ®CONTINUOUS OPERATIONS USING EQUALLOGIC AND VMWAREINDUSTRY: LifeLink Foundation, based in Tampa, Florida, has 500 employees dedicated to theHealthcare recovery and transplantation of organs and tissue. This non-profit, community serviceorganization has multiple divisions, including three Organ Procurement Organizations inPLATFORM:®Microsoft Windows west central Florida, Georgia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands; a Tissue Bank;T Server 2003 Transplantation Immunology Laboratory; and the LifeLink HealthCare Institute, a unique physician group practice which provides comprehensive medical, surgical andAPPLICATIONS: transplant care.TVMware ESX Server ;®Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft The Tampa-based IS department is responsible for all information services at LifeLinkSQL Server, Microsoft Foundation locations - not an easy task when medical information is needed around theSolomon and Business Portal, clock on an urgent basis and not-for-profit capital budgets are limited. With 90,000® ®Microsoft SharePoint ; Citrix ; people in the United States awaiting organ transplants and thousands more in need ofcustom-built clinical databases tissue transplants, clinical databases must be available every minute of every day - livesactually depend on it. In addition, Tampa's geography makes the six-month hurricaneCHALLENGES: season a constant consideration - each time a potential storm is on the horizon, all Providing business continuityand DR of critical transplant- precautions must be in place for business continuity, data protection, and site failover.related information to multiplelocations; managing DR plan- BETTER PROTECTION REQUIREDning and implementation in The need for more extensive disaster recovery (DR) prompted Vice President ofhurricane zone Information Systems John Rhon to upgrade the IS environment. The primary data center®is at LifeLink Foundation headquarters in Tampa, with Citrix software managing access®SOLUTION: from remote offices. The infrastructure is Microsoft-centric, with more than 30 WindowsPS Series arrays in the primary servers each with direct-attached storage (DAS). The Foundation's most important data center and two remote applications are Microsoft SQL Server-based clinical and operational databases relatedsites providing consolidated to transplantation and organ procurement. Other key Microsoft applications are Exchangevirtual storage, snapshot-based for e-mail, Solomon and Business Portal financial applications, and SharePoint collabora-backup and recovery, failover tion software. Before upgrading the infrastructure, each application had a dedicated and DR; VMware provides server virtualization server. The traditional way to implement DR was to deploy identically configured serverpairs for failover - an inefficient, costly, and hard-to-manage arrangement.LEARN MORE:Visit www.lifelinkfound.org DISASTER RECOVERY THROUGH VIRTUALIZATIONRhon's plan was built around creating a virtual data center, including servers and stor-age. First, with aging servers needing replacement, he wanted to implement VMware"Traditional disaster recovery would have added much morecomplexity to our environment - the EqualLogic/VMwaresolution gave us DR along with simplicity."- LifeLink's Vice President of Information Systems,John Rhon
ESX Server to create virtual servers, providing a more flexible to manage, and easy to adapt to new applications. PS200Esenvironment to architect his DR solutions by eliminating installed at LifeLink headquarters and at the LifeLink Tissuedependencies on the underlying physical server hardware. Bank 15 miles away each employ snapshots locally to createAt the same time, moving to a storage area network (SAN) and maintain instantly recoverable copies of the virtual serverswould allow him to consolidate and virtualize storage as well, and data sets. The PS Series' auto-replication is used to mir-centralizing storage capacity otherwise trapped behind indi- ror the virtual servers and data sets between each site,vidual servers. Comments Rhon, "Being freed up from buy- enabling quick recovery at the remote site in case of a disaster.ing identically configured hardware makes disaster recoveryplanning and implementation much easier." VIRTUAL SERVERS AND STORAGE CREATEADVANCED INFRASTRU... [download for more]
