ST. JOSEPH HEALTHCARE CURES ITS DISASTER RECOVERY WOES WITH SANRAD

SANRAD enables St. Joseph Healthcare to virtualize heterogeneous storage while delivering comprehensive, affordable disaster recovery services

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – June 3, 2008 – SANRAD, Inc., the market leader in open iSCSI SAN solutions, today announced that St. Joseph Healthcare in Bangor, Maine, has solved its disaster recovery (DR) challenges by deploying SANRAD's intelligent V-Switches with integrated storage management and virtualization software into its heterogeneous, virtualized environment.

St. Joseph Healthcare's DR Challenge

St. Joseph Healthcare needed to scale for its strategic Emergency Medical Record (EMR) project. Its technology requirements included robust replication in a heterogeneous storage environment with a large amount of data (14TB). St. Joseph Healthcare ideally wanted to add storage from a new vendor, while leveraging their existing storage to save on costs.

The organization is running VMware ESX 3.5 with 96 of their 150 servers virtualized on 10 hosts. Critical applications include Microsoft Exchange 2007 and Microsoft SQL 2005. The goal was to use the existing EMC Symmetrix at the clinic site, with new HP EVA storage at the main hospital site to reduce hardware acquisition costs.

St. Joseph Healthcare's main IT challenges were making disaster recovery work smoothly in a heterogeneous virtualized environment, avoiding vendor lock-in and ensuring high availability at an affordable price.

The Solution: Disaster Recovery with Storage Flexibility and Major Cost Savings

Total Tec Systems, a leading solution provider for server consolidation, virtualization, and enterprise-level IT solutions, partnered with St. Joseph Healthcare to develop and execute this mission-critical project. Total Tec played a key role in recommending an integrated solution to address Eric's important needs.

St Joseph Healthcare deployed two SANRAD V-Switch 3400s with integrated storage virtualization and replication software at its two sites, connected by dark fibre over a Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) in a cluster configuration.

SANRAD's open ISCSI SAN solution freed St. Joseph Healthcare from vendor lock-in while delivering full-featured DR at significant cost savings. With the ability to leverage their existing SAN, St. Joseph Healthcare saved about $300,000 in hardware costs alone.

By installing the SANRAD V-Switch 3400s in an active/active cluster, St. Joseph Healthcare gained easy, enterprise-class DR for its heterogeneous, virtualized environment. These capabilities include comprehensive replication, virtual disaster recovery without user intervention, and easy data migration between its EMC Symmetrix and HP EVA storage with no disruption to server operations. SANRAD's centralized management interface also simplified IT operations, providing a single window to virtualize storage and manage multiple sites for disaster recovery.

"SANRAD's V-Switch solution has given St. Joseph Healthcare the ability to mix and match storage, thus empowering us to develop and maintain a very affordable, yet state-of-the-art DR implementation." said Eric Nelson, CIO and Director of IT, St. Joseph Healthcare. "SANRAD was uniquely able to meet our current disaster recovery needs, while providing us with an open, comprehensive iSCSI SAN platform that can scale to meet our future needs for disaster recovery in a heterogeneous virtualized environment."

"Eric Nelson is a visionary in a new virtual world with the need to re-shape IT strategies, business processes and storage practices," said Kim Tchang, SANRAD Vice President of marketing. "Thus, we are especially pleased that SANRAD was chosen to solve their critical virtualization and DR challenges. St Joseph Healthcare is a role model for virtualization best practices by using its second DR location as a production site to handle all critical system operations, thereby maximizing asset utilization and productivity. In addition, Eric will be able to easily expand his virtual disaster recovery infrastructure without the expense or complexity of storage replication licenses."