Cross-Platform Disaster Recovery for a Provincial People’s Hospital
To illustrate the practical application of enterprise-grade availability strategies in a complex healthcare environment, let us examine a specific case study involving a major provincial hospital.
Client Requirements and Challenges
The hospital operates a heterogeneous IT environment where the core Hospital Information System (HIS) runs on an Oracle RAC infrastructure, while other auxiliary business systems are hosted on a separate virtualization platform.
The IT department faced a multifaceted challenge: they needed to establish a robust disaster recovery (DR) mechanism specifically for the critical Oracle RAC environment. Simultaneously, they required a solution to provide 1-to-1 application-level takeover (failover) for 30 business systems running on a cloud platform, alongside a centralized data backup strategy for a total of 50 business systems.
Implementation Solution
Addressing such a heterogeneous environment required a multi-phased approach tailored to specific workload requirements. Following an extensive assessment of the user environment, the Information2 team architected a two-stage disaster recovery construction process:
- Real-Time Database Protection: Utilizing the i2Active database synchronization solution, the team implemented real-time disaster recovery for the critical HIS business system running within the Oracle RAC environment.
- Centralized Cloud Data Management: To handle the massive data volume (approximately 180 TB) associated with the 50 cloud-hosted business systems, the solution deployed:
- i2CDP (Continuous Data Protection) for 20 systems, enabling granular data recovery to any point in time.
- i2VP (Agentless Backup) for the remaining 30 systems to provide efficient, full-system virtual machine backup.
- High Availability (HA): For the 30 core business systems, the i2Availability intelligent HA solution was deployed to ensure 1-to-1 application-level takeover. This ensures that whether the target is local, remote, or in the cloud, business continuity is maintained during disruptions.
Client Benefits
By deploying this comprehensive architecture, the hospital was able to overcome significant technical hurdles and secure vital medical data.
In the field of data protection, securing an environment that combines Oracle RAC, multi-platform architectures, and massive data volumes is widely considered one of the most complex scenarios to manage. Through Information2’s real-time disaster recovery ecosystem, the Provincial People’s Hospital effectively solved the industry-wide challenge of cross-platform DR. The solution not only unified the protection of databases and massive datasets across virtual and cloud platforms but also provided a guarantee of continuous, secure operations for the hospital’s critical services.