Kindred Healthcare’s main data center is responsible for storing all the data for its corporate applications, including enterprise resource planning (ERP), digitalized patient records and clinical applications, while also providing centralized data backup.
In planning its storage area networks (SAN) upgrade, Kindred considered its current SAN switch vendor but also decided to look at the entire storage environment and redesign its SAN with next-generation features.
As a result, the new SANs support all of Kindred’s mission-critical applications, including payroll, medical appointment and lab scheduling, financials, web-based applications, and email for all of Kindred’s organizations nationwide.
With every subsidiary organization depending on them, the new SANs were designed for end-to-end fault tolerance. Each SAN has dual fabrics for redundancy, as well as dual components for everything else, creating a truly fault-tolerant environment.
Kindred said the actual transfer of data to the new SAN environment was accomplished over a 70-day period, with only a few hours downtime.