Humanitarian & Environmental Mission-Critical Award Finalists Deserve Appreciation
Our 2011 Mission-Critical Innovation Awards are less than a week away! Last week I talked about finalists in 3 of the 4 innovation awards categories so you, the reader could start thinking about who you'd pick as your winner in each category. Today I'd like to provide some more information about my favorite category - Humanitarian/Environmental.
Organizations that "do good" for society or the environment often depend on the reliability, scalability, and performance of Itanium-based systems to support their important work.
While we had to select finalists (and ultimately just one winner), these organizations all deserve appreciation for their impressive achievements:
- Enagás – Enagás is the technical manager of the gas system and common carrier for the high-pressure gas network in Spain. In order to expand their leadership in environmental management, Enagás launched a “Green Datacenter project” (2009-2013), a five-year holistic plan that covers Energy Supply, Data Center Premises, Energy Control, Technology (Servers, Virtualization, Storage, Networking, Software) external audit, Providers and processes. It involved many mission-critical systems projects, including the consolidation of 32 different servers running HP-UX (including two aging PA-RISC Superdomes), into two new Itanium-based Superdomes, a virtualization project with the C7000 chassis and BL460c server with Intel Xeon x86 processors, and installing several BL870-2 9300 series Itanium servers sharing the same C7000 chassis, contributing to energy savings. In September, Enagás was named the worldwide leader for utilities by the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI).
- Purvis Systems – The Fire Department of New York City (FDNY) is the world's largest fire department, serving a city of more than 8 million people as well as those people like me that visit the city or commute in to work. FDNY’s mission-critical dispatch system, the CMICS, supports 11,275 uniformed fire personnel in 221 firehouses, with approximately 500 vehicles, handling hundreds of thousands of total incidents every year. The dispatch formerly ran on a VAX server with VMS V7.2. The fire department wanted to keep the same software but migrate to a more reliable and modern processor. The dispatch system successfully ported to an Itanium rx3600 system running OpenVMS V8.3. The OpenVMS backward compatibility in the solution allowed most of the existing system behaviors to remain unchanged so there was no retraining required of dispatchers or firefighters. The Itanium systems themselves have proven to be extremely reliable with zero downtime due to hardware failure. Dispatchers have experienced much quicker response times - so critical when every second could mean another life saved.
- University Hospitals – University Hospitals Health Systems’ mission is “to heal, to teach, to discover”. The Health Systems’ strategic plan was to provide continuous health care for patients across all UH facilities sharing all data, which included radiology images from all sites. The UH Health Systems provide over 700,000 exams annually over 25 sites. Before the implementation, the radiology environment could not support digital image transfers and patients had to hand-carry their films from site to site. After a thorough review of servers, applications and networks, University Hospitals’ solution was to implement the Sectra IDS7 product running on the Integrity RX6600 dual-core Intel Itanium servers and HP-UX B11.31 with EVA 8400 online storage and the HP MAS solution for archiving. The redundant systems included a read only archive unit and a separate Disaster Recovery system located at separate sites. The current system is now sized to handle one million exams annually. Patient care has been standardized across the health system and patient images are accessible 24x7, 365 days per year. Imagine the life saving possibilities with those improvements!
Congratulations again to our finalists in this category. The winner will be announced the evening of November 28th in Vienna, but they are already all winners in my books!
Please visit our mission-critical musings blog for an update on who won in each category, as well as photos and videos of the celebration. You can also follow @HPIntegrity on twitter for updates.
