Riverbed Technology (NASDAQ: RVBD), the leader in application performance infrastructure, today announced that Upstate University Health System, affiliated with the State University of New York (SUNY), is using Riverbed® SteelAppTM Traffic Manager virtual application delivery controller (ADC) to ensure high availability for its electronic health record (EHR) software from Epic Systems Corporation, which is used by the entire healthcare organization in every patient-related activity. In the year since it was deployed, SteelApp has helped its customer deliver 100% uptime for roughly 15 Epic applications for the 10,000 hospital personnel and medical students who rely on the emergency medical records (EMR) system, without a single instance of its services being down or offline.
SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, NY, is the only academic medical center in central New York. The affiliated Upstate University Health System serves 1.8 million people, often the most seriously ill and injured, and includes two hospitals and numerous satellite sites. Three and a half years ago, Upstate University Health System made the decision to move to Epic for its EHR software application. This is truly a mission-critical application, used by every healthcare provider for all patient-related activities – its performance is critical to the functioning of the organization.
“Epic is, by far, the health system’s most widely used application, with between 2,700 and 3,500 concurrent users depending on the time of day,” said Chris Loughlin, Epic Client Systems Manager at Upstate University Health System. “Epic requires some form of load balancing – to handle the load as more people come online – to be able to apply updates without affecting users and to balance the traffic among Epic’s front-end and auxiliary applications.”
The SteelApp Traffic Manager virtual ADC was already being used successfully by the health system’s Radiology department, which helped Loughlin make the decision to use it for the EMR deployment. In addition, the RiverbedSteelApp ADC cost less than another option being considered, and, as a virtual appliance, SteelApp Traffic Manager complied with his state’s green initiatives and fit nicely into the health system’s VMware environment.
Using SteelApp Traffic Manager, Loughlin was able to get load balancing up and running in less than a week. He has added the other Epic applications to the load balancer, totaling 15 applications. In addition to radiology, various departments also use SteelApp to load balance other business applications.
In addition to ensuring the reliable delivery of a mission-critical application, the SteelApp Traffic Manager gives Loughlin and his colleagues tools for proactive system management and troubleshooting problems that occur. Another huge advantage is how little on-going maintenance it requires.
“SteelApp does what we need it to do very effectively and within our budget,” added Loughlin. “It handles all our traffic with no problem, and the fact that I don’t have to do much with it is very important. With all the other stuff on my plate, not having to constantly watch over the load balancer is huge.”
Riverbed SteelApp (formerly Stingray) isthe #1 virtual ADC for scalable, secure and elastic delivery of enterprise, cloud and e-commerce applications. SteelApp is a family of application delivery products that provide control of traffic to and from applications, enabling fast, reliable and secure application delivery to users anywhere from the cloud or data center. It is a complete software-based Layer 7 ADC with integrated web content optimization (WCO) and application firewall that enables companies to deliver optimized and secure application delivery services where and when they are needed in an elastic manner. Riverbed’s unique approach automates the deployment, licensing and metering of application delivery services, making possible an “ADC per application” delivery model in which costs for ADC-as-a-Service can be allocated to each client application. This unique approach reduces costs and time to production while enabling rapid change and scale for data center applications.
Riverbed SteelApp is part of the Riverbed Application Performance Platform™, the most complete platform to enable organizations to embrace location-independent computing, so that business objectives – not technical constraints – drive how applications and data are delivered.
____________________________________________