Franciscan Skemp Deploys Instantaneous Recovery with First Defense-ISR

La Crosse, Wisconsin, September 2005

Franciscan Skemp Healthcare Franciscan Skemp Healthcare, a member of Mayo Health System headquartered in La Crosse, Wisconsin, has experienced substantial savings in computer technical support resulting from some new software installed by the IT Department.

The hospital has a cluster of Windows 2000 servers supporting a thin-client network. Historically, approximately every three weeks the servers required regular maintenance that involved “cleansing” by rebuilding to a pristine image of the operating system and applications using Ghost™. This procedure would remediate the effects of user activity including modifications of the applications, unintentional downloading of spy-ware and viruses that had corrupted the system, etc. During the three-week interval between system rebuilds, the need for technical support would increase as the servers became
“dirty”. Scheduled maintenance would occur, and the cycle would start again. Each rebuild required about four hours per server. Prior to each rebuild, users were required to log off the server they were using and log onto another server in the network until the  rebuild process was completed. During this period, there was an across-the-board degradation of system performance related to load balancing among the remaining servers.
 

In addition to the scheduled maintenance, some form of corruption would occasionally require immediate IT response often involving a system rebuild.

In September, Craig Rhodes, Network Administrator, had a high availability program, FirstDefense-ISR™ (Immediate System Recovery) installed on the servers. A feature of this software called “Freeze” was invoked, which caused the servers, with each reboot, to return to a pristine snapshot of the operating system and applications in the amount of time required for a simple reboot.

Now, the IT support group schedules each server to boot twice a week at a predetermine time that has the least impact on the networked system performance. Additionally, the IT support staff uses FirstDefense-ISR to create and archive snapshots of each server’s operating system and applications off-site for safe keeping.

The results have been: a) the IT has been able to save one full-time employee position, b) repeat nuisance support calls have been virtually eliminated, and c) load balancing strain has been reduced. In one instance, when a user installed Google toolbar, a global modification impacting all users, the IT staff rebooted the server returning it to a pristine state immediately. Prior to the installation of FirstDefense-ISR, this event would have resulted in four hours of unscheduled IT staff support to rebuild the server.

"First Defense is ideal tool to address the most common issues on server farms, ", say Steve Greenberg of Thin Client Computing, "whether it be a service pack, virus, hotfix, update or application level issue, First Defense  provides the ability to immediately take the server back to a known good state. This is invaluable to our clients that need to maximize uptime and reduce unplanned maintenance and outages".

For More Information contact Thin Client Computing (602) 432-8649, info@thinclient.net