Egenera Inc. announced that Quantros has chosen Egenera for its mission critical Oracle 10g Real Application Clusters (RAC) deployment. Quantros' web-based applications improve the quality of patient care by providing a standard platform for automating resource intensive and manual processes such as benchmarking, outcomes monitoring, accreditation and compliance.

Quantros was experiencing rising costs across the data center including floor space, electricity, cooling, networking and servers. Furthermore, their legacy systems could not be expanded to support a scalable and highly available Oracle RAC deployment without disruption.

"A network of more than 1,500 US healthcare facilities utilize Quantros technology solutions on a daily basis so it's pertinent to have five nines of high availability at all times," said Bryan Rood, director of Internet Data Center Services at Quantros. "Of all the vendors we looked at, Egenera was the solution that provided our required uptime and availability while simultaneously serving as a secure and agile platform for Oracle RAC. With Egenera, we'll develop and roll out our Oracle-based, revenue-generating applications faster than ever. Deploying RAC nodes used to take up to four weeks with the previous architecture and now it takes less than four hours on Egenera."

The Egenera architecture provides an ideal platform to leverage the performance and scalability features of Oracle RAC. In addition to faster time-to-market, the Oracle-on-Egenera deployment has yielded other significant increases in performance, according to Rood at Quantros, including:

• Increased hardware capacity: Egenera's Processing Blade™ specifications quadruple the number of data points for Quantros, producing 4x the database performance than before.
  
• Reduced failure points: Egenera's redundant architecture eliminates potential failure points for high availability, reliability and stability.
  
• Simplified clustering: Egenera PAN Manager™ software enables system administrators to add or remove virtual servers from a cluster on-the-fly by replacing error-prone, physical activities with point-and-click or scripted commands.

"The concepts that Egenera puts into practice make a lot of sense, for instance managing servers from a single console," said Rood. "Our previous architecture didn't have a server management system that let us easily get down to every component of the system, but Egenera lets us do that simply and effectively. We can add and remove compute capacity and network connections with the click of a button and right-size an application without having to deploy new hardware every time a configuration needs to change. The database administrators have found Egenera to be an easier way of doing things and have fully embraced the solution and technology. Egenera has made a significant difference in our data center efficiency and agility."

The Egenera architecture combines stateless, diskless processing blades with unique Egenera® PAN Manager™ software to reduce data center complexity and deliver an agile, highly available infrastructure. PAN Manager replaces hardware infrastructure with software and eliminates manual, resource-intensive systems administration tasks through integrated automation. Rather than tie specific operating systems and applications to physical servers, PAN Manager creates pools of compute, storage and network resources that are dynamically allocated as needed.

Egenera Service and Support

Egenera understands mission critical environments and has created a support program specifically for this environment. Egenera technical support experts are among the most knowledgeable in the industry, with an average of 15 years' experience. Moreover, the single-tier support model means clients will be working with a veteran system administrator from the outset, significantly reducing the time needed to resolve inquiries.

"Egenera assigned a technical account manager to work directly with us on all aspects of the deployment," said Rood. "They have been incredibly helpful in proactively telling me what to expect and if there's anything going on with the system. With some vendors, you don't hear from them for months. Egenera follows up on a regular basis. We look forward to engaging with Egenera Professional Services for our disaster recovery and expansion project in upcoming months."