The Information Technology Challenge

Kindred's Extensive IT Infrastructure

As might be expected for a company with strong attention to customer care and the operational nimbleness required to support the quick business decisions relating to acquisitions and reallocation of resources, Kindred Healthcare has a vast Information Technology (IT) infrastructure to manage its business.

To support its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) initiatives, Kindred uses SAP R/3 Financials and Human Capital Management tools as primary applications. In addition, the department also supports more than 1000 other software applications, including an integrated financial, human resources and payroll system, and business intelligence data warehouse. The company's top priority is that all data, from financial processing to clinical reports, is available online from anywhere within the enterprise.

To make this that possible, its I/T department has 1,300 servers connected by a robust frame relay network to 16,000 workstations supported by approximately 350 professionals. This server architecture supports 51,000 employees, 56 payroll areas, 12 payroll calendars, 98 tax companies, 138 active company codes, and 58,000 Profit/Cost centers. The information management requires a database that has grown to 2000 Gigabytes, 10 times what it had been just eight years earlier.

Growth and the Implications for the I/S Department

Not surprisingly, this kind of growth made it nearly impossible to efficiently manage Kindred's information processing needs.

Additionally, Kindred's ongoing acquisition of new companies created additional company codes which had to be integrated into a 10-day, month-end close process. With acquisitions came new users who needed system access to run reports while existing business organizations requested company codes to support restructuring activities.

This rapid growth of users, company codes and ad-hoc reporting requests made it difficult to complete month-end activities in a timely manner. Database servers ran at 100 percent utilization for two hours every morning following the close. Usage spikes that consumed all of the system capacity became commonplace.

End-user online response times were averaging above two seconds with some processes experiencing even longer delays. Nighttime batch and payroll runs spilled into morning hours, which affected daytime users.

Kindred knew it had to upgrade its entire server landscape quickly or it would be consumed by the very data that had fueled its rapid growth.

It was enough to make an IT department check into Intensive Care some time.

The Solution

The IT challenge required increased capacity, faster response time and improved server availability -- simultaneously.

To support the fundamental needs of capacity and response time, Kindred's I/S Department turned to Alliance Founding Sponsor HP, who recommended and helped deploy its latest HP Integrity rx7620 and rx4640 servers with Intel® Itanium® 2 processors as -the "heart" of the system.

With Itanium® 2 processor architecture, the system could run 64-bit application software, including upgrades to mySAP ERP 2005 and the Microsoft® Windows® Server 2003 operating system. It also allowed adding Microsoft® SQL Server 2000, which supports the latest database functions allowing users to query, analyze, and manipulate data over the web.

To improve system availability, Kindred took advantage of the Itanium® 2 microprocessor's unique high availability features, including bad data containment, memory mirroring and internal hot-swapping to provide data protection and online repairs, and memory compartmentalization for additional security.

Kindred also benefited from Itanium® 2 microprocessor's built-in server cluster support, which allows for mirror image server nodes to rapidly switch over in the case of hardware failures. Microsoft's Cluster Server software (MSCS), installed on the company's Data and Central Instance (CI) servers, are a critical part of the solution because it automates the process of compiling and testing software code, enabling faster deployment of the mirror image server approach.

With this solution, highly available server clusters consisting of two or more nodes that are exact mirror images of each other are installed as part of the solution. If the primary system goes down due to a hardware malfunction, fail-over software immediately makes its twin system the primary node.

The Results

From a pure performance standpoint, the new system performed brilliantly.

The new HP Integrity-based system is more than twice as fast as the legacy servers when running financial reports (Table 1).

Kindred also measured the elapsed time to run single Human Resources reports, and the results showed significant performance increases (Table 2).

Response time was measured while the system was loaded with 1,600 users. The benchmark tests quantified the average on-line user wait times for dialog with applications, database requests and sequential reads of data during a dialog session. The results in Table 3 indicate improvements between 3.3 and 8.0 times.

Kindred measured the response time for the most heavily used SAP transactions. In general, the new system reduced these times between 1.3 and 2.1 times(Table 4).

Kindred wanted to decrease batch processing time, which extended into morning hours, thus impacting day workers. To determine the effect of the new system, Kindred's IT team tested a large composite production control batch, a superset of processes that normally run between 5 PM and 7 AM. The legacy system required 24.9 hours while the new system took 19 hours -- a 24 percent time reduction.

Beyond raw performance increases, the solution provided several additional benefits. The new system streamlined IT operations by decreasing server numbers and centralizing the network, which in turn helped minimize ongoing tech support.

Thanks to HP's Intel® Itanium® solutions and key software from both SAP® and Microsoft®, plus careful planning and integration on the part of the Kindred Healthcare IT team, Kindred's solution is significantly improving access to raw data and processed reports, while lowering costs and simplifying IT support requirements across the organization.

All of this means faster and better decision-making for Kindred Healthcare, and the ability to focus more on providing the highest quality healthcare, the best employee services, and the strongest and stable growth possible.

Customer Solution

Principal Hardware

o 7 HP Integrity rx 4640 Servers with Dual-Core Intel® Itanium® 2 processors (SAP FICO, HR, workflow/batch, quality assurance, and development applications)
o 2 HP Integrity rx7620 Servers (database and SAP R/3 central instance)
o HP 1x4 USB/PS2 KVM Switch
o 2.25 TB SAN storage, linked to Integrity Servers

Principal Software

o HP Systems Insight Manger 4.0
o Microsoft Windows Server 2003
o Microsoft SQL Server 2000 (64-bit)
o Microsoft Cluster Server