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© 1999-2008 | Ixion, L.L.C. |
University of Texas
M.D. Anderson
Messaging Migration |
| Media: | Hardware, Software |
| Type: | Complex Lotus Infrastructure |
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 MD Anderson Success Story |
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| Features: |
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 40% reduction in admin tasks
 99.999% server up time
 Desktop migration 12,000+ users
 Enterprise implementation of iNotes
 Remediated 500+ applications |
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| The Technology: |
 IBM eServer® xSeries® 440
 IBM Enterprise Storage Server™
 IBM Director™
 Tivoli® Data Protection for Domino
 Lotus Notes® Versions 5.0.11 & 6.0.1
 Lotus Instant Messaging™
 Lotus Enterprise Integrator® |
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| The Challenge |
Over a period of seven years, M.D. Anderson experienced insidious growth of its system from a manageable network to a monster of several thousand different applications and databases outside of mail. To put the customer’s growth into perspective, M.D. Anderson’s facilities have increased by about 50 percent in the last five years. It treats more than 60,000 people with cancer yearly—22,000 of whom are new patients. In addition, M.D. Anderson’s user pool spans more than 17,000 employees, volunteers, students and researchers, and a countless number of users from government and/or the community.
To further complicate things, the institute deals with government, private and teaching sectors; so all three variations of environments come into play. Downtime of the non-clustered environment constituted 20 to 30 hours of outages per server yearly, plus a mountain of manual administrative tasks and related personnel.
The customer needed a three main issues addressed: availability, scalability and reliability. While some 31 bids from different solution providers of all sizes were considered, Ixion was chosen to architect and implement the new messaging infrastructure. Why? Steven Gerhardt, Ixion Vice President and Partner, says that Ixion had technical superiority over all the other solutions providers, even the powerhouses:
“We have partnerships with an advanced network of experts. So our customers get the deep skill set of a huge solution provider, but also the flexibility, speed and special attention you can only get with a smaller sized company.” |
| The Solution |
Ixion orchestrated a true migration of the entire Lotus Notes infrastructure—including both hardware and software. Hardware installation included 15 new IBM® eServer® xSeries® 440s, five IBM eServer® xSeries® 345s, IBM HBA Controllers, and IBM “Shark” Enterprise Storage Server™ technology to create a powerful data Storage Area Network (SAN) for the customer.
On the software side, Ixion installed IBM Director™; Tivoli® Data Protection for Lotus Domino; Lotus Notes® Versions 5.0.11 & 6.0.1; Lotus Domino Developer Client™, Administrator Client™, and Everyplace™ SMS; Lotus Sametime™; and Lotus Enterprise Integrator®.
The infrastructure was designed to furnish M.D. Anderson with a timely implementation, plus all the training, education and technical support they needed to maintain their growing network. Ixion stretched the project’s resources through strategic partnerships with Executrain and Edward Lowe & Associates, delivering maximum experience in the areas of education and architecture/software design. |
| The Benefits |
| “The migration project with Ixion was a great success,” said Steve Jenkins, M.D. Anderson’s customer care - Domino manager. “Now in place, the power of the IBM technology is giving us a near 100-percent uptime and significant financial savings.” The now clustered Domino R5 server environment is providing M.D. Anderson with a significant reduction in manual administrative tasks and related personnel, and will lower the total cost of ownership for messaging and collaborative applications. |
| About The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center |
| Celebrating six decades of “Making Cancer History,” the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center is located in Houston on the sprawling campus of the Texas Medical Center. It is one of the world’s most respected facilities devoted exclusively to cancer patient care, research, education and prevention, and was ranked among the nation’s top two cancer hospitals in U.S. News & World Report’s “America’s Best Hospitals” survey. The institution treats more than 60,000 patients every year and spent more than $260 million last year on cancer research. Since 1944, more than 600,000 patients have turned to M. D. Anderson for cancer care in the form of surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, immunotherapy or combinations of these and other treatments. For more information, visit www.mdanderson.org. |
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