Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

HEALTH CARE GROUP IMPLEMENTS BUSINESS PLAN WITH BROCADE SANS

Brocade Communications Systems Inc, a leading provider of infrastructure for storage area networks, announced that Liberty Health Care Group Inc, a leading direct-to-home provider of diabetes and respiratory medications and supplies, has chosen Brocade SAN infrastructure to support ongoing data growth, simplify management and help eliminate system downtime through an overall business continuance strategy. To address its rapid data growth and high-availability requirements, Liberty's Technology Services team has deployed a core-to-edge SAN solution consisting of Brocade SilkWorm 3800 and SilkWorm 2800 fabric switches.

Liberty has plans to connect two data centers into one unified SAN fabric. The SAN configuration is designed to provide redundancy for each data center. This architecture is designed to provide the company's 750 customer service representatives with uninterrupted access to all applications and customer order information. In addition, this redundancy will help enable Liberty to comply with new regulations for maintaining patient records. With more than half a million customers, Liberty's chief data management challenge is related to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which requires the company to store certain information pertaining to customer transactions, from initial customer contact through order fulfillment.

"Having our data safe and accessible is critical to us, and our Brocade SAN has enabled us to implement a business continuance plan to support this need," said John Hegner, vice president of technology services at Liberty Medical Corporation. "In addition, we've increased our storage and server environment tenfold to 150 servers supporting 35 terabytes of data, while maintaining our core staff of four people to manage the SAN."

"Liberty's implementation of Brocade is an excellent demonstration of how an organization can leverage the scalability and high availability features of SANs to generate return on investment quickly and protect its data," said Tom Buiocchi, Brocade vice president of marketing. "We are pleased that Liberty has selected Brocade to support its demanding requirements for information uptime."