SAN MATEO, CA – April 30, 2020 – SIOS Technology Corp., an industry pioneer in providing IT resilience through intelligent application availability, today announced that Chris O’Brien Lifehouse is using SIOS DataKeeper to take full advantage of the economies of scale afforded in the AWS cloud without sacrificing uptime or performance.
Chris O’Brien Lifehouse is one of Australia’s largest clinical trial centers specializing in state-of-the-art treatment and research for patients who are suffering from rare and complex cancer cases. The not-for-profit hospital sees more than 40,000 patients annually for screening, diagnosis and treatment.
Lifehouse uses the MEDITECH healthcare system, which stores the electronic health records for all patients in a database. “The health information system and database are vital to the care we provide, and if either goes down, patient records would not be accessible, and that would paralyze the hospital’s operations,” explained Peter Singer, Director Information Technology at Lifehouse. In the hospital’s datacenter, mission-critical uptime has been provided by Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) running on a Storage Area Network (SAN). But like many organizations, Lifehouse wanted to migrate to the cloud to take advantage of its superior agility and affordability.
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Performance Problems Persist for Critical Applications in the Cloud
Lifehouse chose Amazon Web Services as its cloud service provider, and had hoped to “lift and shift” its environment directly to the AWS cloud. To simulate its on-premises configuration, Singer chose a “cloud volumes” service available in the AWS Marketplace, however, it had a substantial adverse impact on throughput performance. With so many elements and layers involved, performance problems are notoriously difficult to troubleshoot in software-defined configurations deployed in the cloud. With the “No Protection” option specified, the cloud volumes performed well. But “No Protection” was not really an option for the mission-critical MEDITECH application and its database.
“We made every reasonable effort to find and fix the root cause, and eventually concluded that software-defined storage would never be able to deliver the throughput performance we needed,” Singer recalled. So the IT team at Lifehouse began looking for another solution.
In its search for another solution capable of providing both high availability and high performance, Lifehouse established three criteria: Validation for use in the AWS cloud to minimize risk associated with using a third-party solution in the cloud; the ability to work across multiple Availability Zones would assure business continuity in the event an entire AWS datacenter was impacted by a localized disaster; and performance that was as good as or better than what had been achieved on-premises.
