Case Study Zerto enables ARA to migrate its missioncritical applications and servers Medical imaging provider ARA relies on Zerto to maintain a 24/7 enterprise while relocating its datacenters Overview Austin Radiological Association, MSO LLC (ARA) provides medical imaging services at 17 outpatient centers, and professional radiologist services for 20 area hospitals in Central Texas. Founded in 1954, it offers a range of services including mammography, MRI, CT and pediatric imaging. Twelve years ago, ARA moved from printing film to storing medical images digitally. ARA operates one primary and one backup datacenter, has over 250 virtual machines between them, and runs roughly 200 applications. To effectively serve its healthcare customers, according to CIO R. Todd Thomas, ARA has to be a highly-available, 27/7 digital enterprise. Under U.S. healthcare law, ARA is also required to have a documented disaster recovery plan. ARA needed a solution to quickly migrate its virtual instances to another datacenter in an emergency and ensure its business continuity. To achieve those strategic requirements, ARA became a Zerto customer in 2011. With Zerto Virtual Replication the team at ARA was able to complete a datacenter migration in a compressed window. They continue to use ZVR to deliver aggressive service levels across their infrastructure with a product that is very easy to use.
Challenges Austin Radiological Association, MSO LLC (ARA) needed to: • Move its two datacenters in a short time frame • Avoid downtime and service disruption • Resolve server issues quickly during migration
Solution Zerto Virtual Replication solution: • Helped ARA fully and safely replicate servers before migration • Orchestrated the primary datacenter failover over a matter of hours • Allowed engineers to easily solve issues during migration
The Problem At the end of 2013, with its lease set to expire, ARA decided to move both its administrative office and its two datacenters to new locations. “We had to move both datacenters in a very short amount of time,” said Jack Yudell, Datacenter Operations Manager, ARA. “And we used Zerto to pull that off.” “Effectively what we had to do was move our applications from the primary datacenter to the secondary datacenter,” explained Todd Thomas. “Then we had to relocate all the hardware to the new primary location. We then needed to fail back our applications once the equipment was relocated.” ARA then had to move its backup datacenter, sync the applications, and accomplish all of this quickly, without taking down its systems and with minimal impact to its customers.
Zerto allows us to move these applications around so that we can shut down hardware and relocate it. Looking at our time frame, we migrated the non-critical servers over the period leading up to the point when we actually migrated the mission-critical servers. You would not be able to do that in a physical environment.”– R. Todd Thomas, CIO, Austin Radiological Association, MSO, LLC
Case Study – Austin Radiological Association
Why Zerto Virtual Replication? We had planned a very long time for the migration of the applications and data. Using Zerto Virtual Replication (ZVR) ARA was able to complete the twin datacenter migration over two weekends in July 2014. We were very impressed that we could complete this so quickly and the impact to our business was almost nothing. “We had to move very quickly, and fortunately we had Zerto, so most of the servers were replicated, said Yudell. “The primary task was to verify that everything had a green light and was good to go. Zerto gives you a red-green-yellow light idea of all your servers and their protection levels. When we saw green lights and that everything was protected, we knew that we were good to hit the failover button.” ARA began the initial migration of its mission-critical servers at midnight on a Friday. “It took roughly 6 to 7 hours to move our primary data center,” said Gary Desporte, an ARA systems engineer. “With a legacy system that would have taken a lot longer—days or weeks.” Using Zerto, “we were able to use bandwidth effectively and get everything shuffled down to our failover site in a matter of hours.” With Zerto Virtual Replication, the migration time was reduced by 97%. This usually complex process was executed in just a couple of clicks. •
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Fast replication and failover times: “Zerto gave us a complete replication and failover in a very quick manner,” said Jack Yudell. “We had it in place before we were told we had to consolidate the data centers and move them. We were able to meet the expectations of the company, which are very high. Without Zerto we would not have been able to meet their expectations at all.” Continuous data protection (CDP): “We did have a problem with one of the servers that we used the CDP functionality to solve,” explained Yudell. “Instead of stopping the migration entirely, the CDP function built into Zerto allowed us to recover and continue with the migration. That is a Zerto feature that I would to bring to the front.” Recovery point objectives (RPO): “The RPO setting gives you an idea of exactly where you are in the replication,” said Yudell, “and the ability to tune the CDP to lessen the amount of time it takes to fully sync. We had it set for four hours to start with. To speed up the replication process, we lowered the setting down to one hour, so that when we had a change it would go over quicker.” Minimal downtime: “The RPO setting gives you an idea of exactly where you are in the replication,” said Yudell, “and the ability to tune the CDP to lessen the amount of time it takes to fully sync. We had it set for four hours to start with. To speed up the replication process, we lowered the setting down to one hour, so that when we had a change it would go over quicker.” Manageability and saving time: “With Zerto it doesn’t take nearly as much time for individuals to manage things, as it does with a physical solution, or multiple solutions,” said Yudell.“Zerto allows me to assign a failover task to an engineer, and not expect him to take two working days to move over a server, to shut down the physical server, unplug it, pack it up, and get it up and running at the new location.”
About Austin Radiological Association, MSO LLC (ARA) Since 1954, Austin Radiological Association (ARA) has been a leader in imaging services in Austin and Central Texas, providing CT, MRI, mammography, MBI, x-ray, ultrasound, PET/CT, SPECT/CT, nuclear imaging and bone densitometry. For 60 years, ARA has committed itself to innovation and invests in the latest technology to provide the highest quality of care to patients and referring physicians. Find out more about ARA by visiting ausrad.com.
About Zerto Zerto has developed a software-based platform for workload mobility, migration, protection and recovery in hybrid-cloud environments, allowing for seamless flexibility and manageability of applications whether they reside on-premise or in the cloud. The company’s Cloud Fabric platform is based on the award-winning Zerto Virtual Replication software which has become the standard for protection, recovery and migration of data in cloud and virtualized datacenters. For more information, please visit: www.zerto.com. n
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