APC Helps Sisters of Mercy

NEW ORLEANS -- APC, a global leader in power, cooling and management solutions, today announced that Sisters of Mercy Health System (Mercy), the ninth-largest Catholic healthcare system in the U.S., recently implemented APCs InfraStruXure® architecture across eight of its fourteen distributed data centers as part of an enterprise-wide rollout. APC’s InfraStruXure architecture fully integrates power, cooling, racks, physical security, and remote 24x7 data center monitoring. With InfraStruXure, Mercy was able to implement the latest data center power and cooling infrastructure and standardize its multiple data center environments across multiple states while providing high availability and agility, as well as easy scalability for future growth. Mercy plans to deploy InfraStruXure across its six remaining data centers in the months ahead.

Sisters of Mercy Health System, based in Chesterfield, Mo., operates hospitals, physician practices, outpatient clinics, health plans, and related health and human services in a seven-state area. They continue to receive industry accolades for their innovative use of information technology aimed at improving the quality of patient care. Picture archiving and communications systems (PACS) digital imaging, prescription ordering, and electronic medical records are only a few of the patient-facing applications either utilized or being considered for Mercy’s health facilities to improve quality, avoid errors, and reduce the cost of care.

With this increased reliance on IT solutions for patient care, Mercy’s data centers are one of the key foundation blocks of the IT infrastructure and are increasingly vital to supporting the applications that aid the care givers in improving care, improving patient safety, staying compliant with government regulations and reducing costs. Therefore, any downtime can result in serious consequences if the applications are not available to Mercy employees when needed. This made proactive monitoring an essential component for Mercy during its evaluation of data center solutions.

“We needed an integrated solution that would provide us the infrastructure and monitoring capability to support our high availability objectives,” said Bill Hodges, director of data center operations, Sisters of Mercy Health System. “InfraStruXure’s modular architecture allows us to proactively monitor all of our infrastructure areas including data centers, network closets, single phase UPS units, racks, rows, power distribution, cooling and security on a 24x7 basis. The alternative was to integrate multiple different vendor solutions without the guarantee of a seamless integrated solution. InfraStruXure’s fully-integrated system provides our Enterprise Command Center with proactive alerts based on pre-determined thresholds. This system, which uses standardized, modular components, is the ideal solution for our fourteen data centers.”

American Power Conversion Corp. (APC)