Mercy Memorial Hospital, a Monroe, Mich.-based not-for profit community care provider, has rolled out a new server virtualization and disaster recovery solution.

In collaboration with CDW Healthcare, a Vernon Hills, Ill.-0based provider of IT solutions for the healthcare market, Mercy Memorial officials said the new initiative is part of a push to streamline network management processes and increase the reliability of clinical applications.

The hospital had previously outsourced all of its network management processes. Hospital officials said this outsourcing, coupled with its complicated clinical information environment, created a need to implement a new system in order to improve efficiencies in workflows as well as patient care.

“The difference between our previous server environment and our current virtualized environment is staggering,” said Eric Mynster, Mercy's IT operations manager. “Our applications run faster and perform better, and our IT staff isn’t burdened with the headaches of managing a fractured network.”

Mercy Memorial Hospital, a 238-bed facility providing care to Monroe and Lenawee counties including the Detroit metropolitan area and northwest Ohio, provides hospital services that include labor and delivery, cancer care, home health and hospice care, physical rehabilitation therapy and dialysis treatment.

After an assessment of the hospital’s technology needs, Mercy implemented an EMC customized solution that includes CLARiiON servers, Centra and Avamar hardware and software as well as VMware virtualization technology. The goal of the implementation was to create two data centers to protect against one network failure.