United Regional Healthcare System

United Regional Healthcare System is driven by a passion for healing and an unwavering commitment to excellence, United Regional has touched the lives of the people of Wichita Falls and surrounding areas for nearly 100 years. For them, providing world-class medical care is more than a day’s work. It’s their life’s work.

At the beginning of 2013 Jerry Marshall (Director of IS) was faced with a challenge. He needed to build out a Disaster Recovery site that had very little floor space and no room for expansion. Jerry reached out to his trusted partner, Cima Solutions Group, for help. Jerry and his team took part in a RightSafe workshop that included an overview of his production environment and prioritizing his applications from Tier 1 (short recovery times) down to Tier 3 (can be down for more than 24 hours). As a result of the workshop, Cima Solutions Group (Cima) was able to design a disaster recovery solution that leverages the power of a unified computing platform found in IBM’s PureFlex.

By combining all elements of his needs – Intel servers, AIX servers, storage and server virtualization, storage compression, network and management of all components with a single interface – United Regional was able to condense their DR environment into a single rack. By using the compression found in the v7000 he was also able to reduce the amount of storage required in DR. Coupling his DR solution with the deployment of VMware’s Site Recovery Manager to manage the VM’s being replicated from production made the DR solution even easier to manage.

“We deployed this technology with the help of Cima and IBM and had our facility in place and functional in two weeks.” said Jerry Marshall, Director of Information Services. “We looked at other unified computing solutions as alternatives but I felt very comfortable moving forward with Cima’s recommendation in the IBM PureFlex system.”