A Customer Success
from the Experts in
Business-Critical ContinuityTM.
Founded in 1973 as a not-for-profit healthcare organization, Adventist Health
System has quickly grown to become the largest not-for-profit Protestant healthcare
provider in the nation. Through its 37 hospitals and 50,000 employees throughout
Florida and the southeastern United States, Adventist Health System provides care
for four million patients each year. Adventist Health System Information Services
(AHS-IS), the company’s information services division, maintains clinical and
business systems dedicated to providing a secure, effective, integrated patient care
delivery system that continually improves outcomes, reduces costs, increases
efficiency and enhances patients’ experiences. Located in Lake Mary, Florida, AHS-IS
provides technology systems and services for 26 of Adventist Health System’s 37
hospitals.
The keys to helping Adventist Health System provide extraordinary, compassionate
care to its patients are the data center servers and systems housing the
organization’s data and applications, from patient records to accounting services.
To help ensure its data center runs 24/7 at peak efficiency and accessibility, AHS-IS
engages the services of data center management solutions from Avocent, saving
the organization’s data center team significant time, space and effort.
“Avocent has done a great job in making our data center
environment more stable and efficient. It has given us a
clear view into our environment with more secure and
consistent remote access.”
– Luis R. Cortes Jr., Systems Administrator, AHS-IS
Main Challenge and Solution
Over the past year, AHS-IS has been standardizing on the Avocent DSR® KVM over
IP switch appliances (models 2030 and 2035) for advanced remote, out-of-band
management and utilizing the latest version of DSView® 3 management software
for anytime, anywhere centralized management of all its connected data center
servers and systems. These data center control and management solutions from
Avocent provide Adventist Health System secure, automated, real-time tracking and
control of all its data center servers and systems, so it can easily manage change from
any location, at any time of day or night.
“It’s amazing the control over our environment that Avocent gives us,” says Luis R.
Cortes Jr., Systems Administrator for AHS-IS. “Avocent gives us a clear window into
our infrastructure, putting everything we need right in front of us, as if we were
physically in the data center. If we actually need to go to the data center, the server
labeling in the solution also makes it easy for us to know exactly where each unit is,
so we can go straight to it.”
A Customer Success
from the Experts in
Business-Critical ContinuityTM.
“Avocent gives us the ability to remotely access and work on any of
our 1,300 physical servers and 600 virtual servers from anywhere
as if we were in the data center,” Cortes continues. “Before we
stabilized our environment with Avocent, our people would have to
walk from their work areas to the data room on another floor just to
discover the state of one of our servers after a reboot. We no longer
have to leave our desk to see when a server is waiting on a ‘hit-anykey’ prompt or if it’s having a hardware problem. Avocent saves us
time, frustration and for those of us who don’t like being in the cold
data room, it saves us from freezing while we work. We can do it all
from our desks.”
“We have about 50 to 60 Avocent KVMs supporting our 1,300 physical servers,” Cortes says. “But, if we weren’t using Avocent, we would
need a lot more KVMs and we wouldn’t have space for them. All of
our team would also have to work right inside the data room. There’s
not enough room for us to work in there.”
Time Savings
Team Efficiency
monitor and mouse for each system is horrendous. The Avocent DSR
KVM appliances save us a lot of space, allowing us to maintain clean
racks, while giving us a view of multiple boxes at a time.”
The ability for the Avocent DSR switch appliances to support multiple
systems saves data center space in other ways as well.
In addition to saving its people the time to walk up or down a flight
of stairs to check on a server, the time savings add up even more for
those administrators at AHS-IS with responsibility for geographically
dispersed sites.
One of the ways that the Avocent solutions contribute to greater
overall data center efficiency for AHS-IS is by enabling the systems and
data center administrators to work together in a more cooperative and
coordinated effort.
“We’ve had instances when the people on our teams have had to drive
about two hours to get to a server that has gone down,” Cortes says.
“With Avocent DSView software, they can now access the server without having to worry about making that long drive. Avocent lets us see
what’s going on with all our servers, so we can quickly and easily take
care of any problems they encounter.”
“Avocent enables us to work more efficiently as a team,” Cortes says.
“We can work better with the admins at our other sites and even fill in
for them when they’re out sick. Avocent gives us the ability to manage
a very large data center infrastructure with a small headcount and
manage our distributed environments as if we were there.”
The time savings that Avocent delivers also means that AHS-IS can
respond faster to issues that arise in the data center, even after hours.
“Even though our team might go home at 5:00 p.m., if something
occurs with one of our systems in the data center, we have to be ready
and available around the clock to take care of it,” explains Cortes. “If
I get a call at 1:00 a.m., I can just roll out of bed, and Avocent lets me
get to the unit to immediately find out what the problem is and often
fix it instead of wasting 30 to 60 minutes driving to our site.”
Space Savings
In addition to time savings, Avocent saves AHS-IS space on its server
racks and its data center environment.
“With a single Avocent DSR switch, we can control between 16 to
32 servers,” Cortes says. “The thought of having to have a keyboard,
The more that AHS-IS takes advantage of the data center manageability and control offered by Avocent, the more it expects to leverage it to
manage other aspects of its infrastructure. It’s already looking at ways
that it can use Avocent DSView 3 software to manage the Liebert®
cooling systems in its data centers, and it expects to find other ways
to bring even more aspects of its environment under the efficient
management umbrella that Avocent provides.
“When a solution comes on board—like Avocent—that provides unity,
stability and reliability, it not only tends to stick around, but it’s usefulness continues to expand,” Cortes says. “Avocent has done a great job
in making our data center environment more stable and efficient. It
has given us a clear view into our environment with more secure and
consistent remote access. We look forward to an even better future as
we continue to work with and learn what more Avocent can do for us
in providing even greater data center efficiency.”
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