Los Angeles, Calif. — August 9, 2017 —Sharp HealthCare (Sharp) and T2 Tech Group (T2 Tech) successfully completed the design and implementation of a redundant architecture and disaster recovery site and released a case study to chronicle their journey. The site was built at the Sharp Rees-Stealy Medical Group facility in San Diego, California. Completing the project marked the end of phase one in a large, two-part data center transformation. Along with finishing the redundant buildout, the second phase of the project includes a migration out of the Sharp Operations Center (SOC) data center.
During the disaster recovery solution project, they put a top priority on maintaining hospital operations and delivering uninterrupted services to patients and staff. For more than 60 of Sharp’s applications — including the organization’s Cerner Millennium EHR software — the team created an architectural diagram, mapped out a failover process, built out and configured solutions at the failover facility, and developed runbooks and playbooks.
The organizations efficiently went through the process of testing failover procedures and functionalities for each of the applications without taking down the production site or causing any disruption or degradation of normal hospital activity. This process was streamlined by a combination of Sharp’s IT team and the T2 Tech hybrid-Agile methodology that balances upfront planning with an iterative execution approach.
Within the framework of the management method, the team parsed long-term project plans into two-week iterations, held daily meetings with core team members and provided accurate stakeholder reporting. Each iteration within the management framework represented a vertical slice of the entire project. Using the framework, the team could work all the way through one application thread and apply lessons learned when starting on the next application. By applying lessons learned before the entire project’s completion, the team became more efficient in the near- and long-term.
Sharp’s investment in a redundant architecture marks the first phase of Sharp’s data center transformation initiative. The next phase of the project includes a migration out of the SOC, Sharp’s old data center. To efficiently implement the next phase, the team will leverage the application environment knowledge and process improvements gained in phase one.
“With entire communities depending on us for their medical needs, Sharp HealthCare must maximize its use of resources and avoid downtime in its critical software and services,” said Teri Moraga, VP of IT Infrastructure, Sharp HealthCare. “When it was time to find a project management partner to help reshape our approach to IT disaster recovery, T2 Tech Group was selected because of their experienced team and unique project management methodology. Helping drive the successful completion of our redundant buildout, their project managers allowed our application team to work more efficiently, and they helped provide crucial knowledge and processes that will streamline our future move to a new primary data center.”
Sharp HealthCare is comprised of 18,900 employees, 2,900 affiliated physicians, four acute-care hospitals, three specialty hospitals, three affiliated medical groups and a full spectrum of other facilities and services. Guided by T2 Tech’s project management, Sharp’s work on the redundant buildout and migration to a new primary data center will improve scalability and reliability. This effort will help ensure the vast health system can serve its patients without interruption. It will also enable innovations that support Sharp’s pursuit of the Triple Aim.