Mercy Medical Center’s New Storage Area Network Speeds Data

Cisco Storage Solution Speeds Data Access, Improves Business Continuity, and Supports Regulatory Requirements

Storage Networking World - DALLAS, Texas. - Mercy Medical Center-Des Moines is providing its staff with faster access to data with a new storage area network (SAN) based on Cisco® data storage technology. The Cisco-based SAN will enable the medical center to accommodate the rapid growth of data, improve business continuity, and meet compliance requirements for accessing and storing data. The new SAN has also enabled Mercy to implement a robust disaster recovery plan and support faster access to data.

“Fast recoverability, throughput, and scalability were the critical factors we needed for our long term success,” said Roger Wilson, Systems and Networking Manager, Mercy Medical Center. “We also liked the Cisco SAN monitoring and diagnostic tools- you don’t realize how important that is until you’re in the middle of troubleshooting.”

One of the Midwest’s major medical referral centers, with three campuses and more than 6,500 employees, Mercy Medical Center consolidated two separate SAN “islands” into one large, highly available SAN based on Cisco MDS 9509 Multilayer Directors. Cisco CWDM Multiplexers connect the main data center to a secondary backup and disaster recovery site, supporting the medical center’s robust disaster recovery plan. Since physicians, clinicians, and administrators have all come to rely on email as a quick means of communication, the SAN will also be used to deploy backup storage for email.

“All our critical applications, including human resources, financials, and clinic scheduling, are stored on the SAN,” said Wilson. “With our new system in place, we can mirror both data and mission critical applications to the remote site to ensure very quick recovery in the event of disaster.”

Cisco virtual SAN (VSAN) technology was one of the deciding factors that led Mercy to select Cisco over other vendors. The medical center used VSAN capability to migrate data from the old SAN to the new one, then to separate production data from backup data. Mercy also benefits from investment protection because the modular design and flexible architecture of the Cisco MDS 9509 Multilayer Directors allow the storage team to non-disruptively add capacity and deploy new intelligent fabric applications by adding additional line cards, without a huge forklift upgrade.

“We can easily add new future capabilities now, and that’s key to supporting our needs for the future,” said Wilson.