Red Hat announced that Florida Hospital relies on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat Global File System, Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red Hat Network to maintain reliable disaster-recovery systems that protect and maintain critical patient information.

The hospital's MIS Department manages one centralized datacenter for all seven facilities and includes approximately 100 developers. Florida Hospital's IT systems needed a cost-effective solution that could replace its expensive proprietary operating system, and a solution that could improve the reliability of its disaster-recovery systems.

Initially, Florida Hospital turned to Red Hat because it provided cost efficiencies for its Web initiative, but found many more advantages for its disaster-recovery project. The hospital soon realized that Red Hat solutions could offer additional benefits, such as greater reliability and increased hardware and software compatibility. Florida Hospital now runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux on 70 HP and IBM servers, and also incorporates JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. The hospital's proprietary applications, including those for patient care, financial and data-management solutions, run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In order to protect its critical information, the hospital created a unique disaster-recovery solution that utilizes Red Hat Global File System running on the SAN and Red Hat Cluster Suite with a six-node cluster. To facilitate infrastructure management, security compliance and new-system deployment, Florida Hospitals also implemented Red Hat Network.

"Red Hat enabled us to create a highly efficient disaster-recovery system that expedited restoration time from days to minutes. This means we make patient data readily available and provide the highest level of care at all times," said Jack Velazquez, senior systems engineer at Florida Hospital. "With 100 developers on our team, we rely on Red Hat to save us time on everyday management issues so we can focus on creating new solutions. Our parent company has been impressed by our efficiency, ROI and performance gains from using Red Hat solutions."

Florida Hospital is looking forward to expanding Red Hat usage. In the near future, the hospital's Open Systems Team will be implementing Red Hat virtualization capabilities for some of their projects.

"When it comes time to upgrade again, we intend to move more of our mid-range systems to Linux. We'd love to experience Red Hat performance and reliability throughout the entire hospital," said Velazquez.