Covenant Healthcare
Covenant Healthcare Systems Inc. was formed by the merger of five Milwaukee-area hospitals. Over the course of a few years, the information technology operations were consolidated into a single data center that handles the hospitals and about 60 sub-acute care facilities and doctors' offices. The challenge, from a removable tape management point of view, was how to control the tapes from different types of systems (IBM S390s and AS400s, as well as Digital and H-P) as the systems were being consolidated, as well as how to then manage tapes from a number of sources in an open systems environment.
Judy Zanzinger, Assistant Manager of Data Processing Operations for Covenant Healthcare Systems, turned to B&L Associates for its open system tape management product, Vertices®. "We understood how to do tape management in a very controlled mainframe environment," said Zanzinger. "What we didn't know was how we would be able to apply the same discipline that had worked so well to open systems."
Covenant decided to start with the most expensive departments first -- the data warehouse and IS operations. As each system was consolidated, the IS staff defined the system logic. Then B&L showed Covenant Vertices and they explained that Vertices would be flexible and easy enough for anyone on the IS staff to use since Covenant does not have a full-time tape librarian. Daily, weekly, monthly and annual backups were defined and the retention periods were assigned to each piece of media. Barcode labels were affixed to the tapes so that, simply by scanning the barcode, the full volume log, history, movement and status of each tape could be instantly accessed.
Now, Covenant has eight UNIX servers up and running, such as the pharmacy system, the care manager (charting and lab information), admissions, discharges and transfers, and other administrative and medical operations. It also has about 40 Microsoft Windows NT servers. For each system, the staff performs backups, system dumps and audits, which generate about 800 circulating tapes. Each shift does backups while the day shift runs verification reports and sends the tapes off site. "It's a great system," continued Zanzinger. "It was easy to set up and now I know exactly where everything is. Even when tapes are with our offsite storage vendor we know when they are scheduled to return or, if we need one right away, we can call them and tell them exactly what box the tape we're looking for is in."
"The staff likes Vertices, too. The use of bar code scanners helps them accurately and quickly log and locate the right tape, and they rely on Vertices to make sure they don't overwrite a tape that should be saved. They simply scan the barcode and Vertices immediately tells them whether the tape is available to be overwritten."
"Best of all, now we have very few errors so everyone is very confident in Vertices," concluded Zanzinger.
