: Blue Patagon : Noticias

Florida Hospital Enhances IT Performance and Patient Care with Red Hat Solutions

With seven facilities totaling over 2,300 beds throughout Central Florida, Florida Hospital is the largest hospital in the state. Established in 1908, the hospital provides care to more than one million patients each year and is part of the Adventist Healthcare System—the largest not-for-profit healthcare provider in the nation. Florida Hospital’s MIS Department, which includes approximately 100 developers, manages one centralized datacenter for all of its facilities, making it one of the busiest centers in Central Florida. The hospital is also known for its excellent quality of healthcare. US News and World Report magazine has ranked Florida Hospital as one of “America’s Best Hospitals” consecutively for the past six years.

Solution Initially, Florida Hospital turned to Red Hat because it provided cost efficiencies for its Web initiative, but then found many more advantages for its disaster recovery project. “We realized that using Red Hat in our data warehouse would help us resolve hardware-software compatibility issues that can cause unnecessary system downtime. Red Hat’s large network of certified vendors ensures that most drivers are built into the operating system kernel, resulting in smoother operations,” said Velazquez. Florida Hospital also chose to use the Red Hat Network, Red Hat Cluster Suite, and Red Hat Global File System (GFS) to restructure the way its disaster recovery system was designed and managed. Today, 70 HP and IBM servers run Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which runs a number of databases, including the hospital’s two-terabyte Oracle data warehouse. Red Hat Enterprise Linux also runs JBoss Application Server and the hospital’s proprietary applications, which include patient care, financial, and data management solutions. A group of servers is also dedicated to communication and system protection applications, such as authentication, user id management, mail, and virus scanning. To protect all of this critical information, the Open Systems Team created a unique disaster-recovery system by offloading all applications and data to the Red Hat Global File System running on the SAN. Using Red Hat Cluster Suite, the team created a six node cluster. Each of the clusters shares two volumes on the GFS: one for the applications and the other for data. “With Red Hat GFS, we no longer need to replicate data or applications if a server goes down,” said Velazquez. “The servers simply provide CPU and power. Everything else runs from GFS.” To upgrade or restore a machine in the cluster, the team simply installs Red Hat Enterprise Linux and attaches the computer to the SAN. Within minutes, it’s ready to go. The Open Systems Team also implemented Red Hat Network to facilitate infrastructure management, security compliance, and new system deployment. “Red Hat Network makes system management easy, enabling us to deploy new applications and security patches to all servers at once,” said Velazquez. Florida Hospital’s data security office continually conducts security audits, and Red Hat Network tracks all system activities, making it possible for the Open Systems Team to provide detailed reports for HIPAA compliance.