In order to provide a more efficient and reliable service to its customers, Hospital de Clínicas Caracas entrusts SupraBT with the most sophisticated high availability solution for databases in the market: Oracle Database Real Application Clusters. Backed by this platform, the IT Department puts Hospital de Clínicas Caracas at the technological forefront to take on new challenges.

The Hospital de Clínicas Caracas, founded in March 1985, currently has more than 1400 employees including administrative personnel, doctors, nurses, orderlies, messengers, maintenance, among others; operating on its 8 floors, with 147 consulting rooms, 12 operating rooms and several offices and serving a monthly average of 1250 hospitalized patients, 1375 emergencies attended (adults and pediatric), 1084 surgeries and 84 deliveries.

The hospital’s IT Manager, Carol Duque, contacted SupraBT to explain HCC’s strategic technology upgrade plan and how it has invested in the implementation of a system that automates and centralizes the operations of the different areas in order to provide better customer service and greater operational, tactical and strategic control.

One of the most important technological components on which virtually the entire universe of business applications is leveraged is the database management system. Its importance comes from the fact that it must guarantee access and availability to the data used by the applications, since their speed, business continuity, interoperability, flexibility and concurrency will depend on them.

1. Mainly to reduce turnaround times for all operations
2. Install a new platform that would allow the possibility of carrying out scheduled shutdowns for database administrative activities to ensure business continuity.
3. A database management system that would not require a large initial investment and could grow as needed.
4. A database manager capable of allowing access to administrative tasks (e.g. version upgrades, new security patches, etc.), while providing uninterrupted service to your customers because the service must be guaranteed 365 days a year, 24 hours a day.
5. Reducing database server administration tasks
6. Centralizing information in a robust, highly available database

Giuseppe Rosellino, I.T. Area Manager, explains that applications performed slowly and sometimes suffered from “freezing”, which required the investment of many working hours to solve these problems, as well as carrying out scheduled shutdowns, affecting business continuity and delaying high-demand tasks.

After extensive planning by the I.T. department together with SupraBT, we determined that the only solution that would fully meet the challenge would be the Oracle RAC (Real Application Cluster) database in its standard edition. Offering an active-active node architecture, the solution enables the deployment of a clustered database, i.e., a set of servers operating as if they were a single server but providing benefits such as fault tolerance, performance and scalability without the need for application changes. This configuration also allows for business continuity and high availability with a database administration transparent to the user, which provides the ideal environment for applications that need to operate 24×7.

The implementation of this solution involved SupraBT’s support in the following activities:

1. 1. Database Consulting Service: SupraBT’s specialized technical support on Oracle products.
   2. Database Cluster: clustered architecture using Oracle Real Application Cluster of 2 nodes (Active – Active) resulting in a high availability architecture.