There is never a good time to have a business critical server unexpectedly fail, especially when it occurs over a weekend.

The pharmacy has a robot system that assists with selecting the correct prescriptions.

The robot, the dispense of medicine, Medicare rebates, Eftpos, etc. are all managed by the server. Dispensing medication manually with hand written notes wasn’t sustainable for long.

After receiving the call, Integer attended the Wauchope site to evaluate the failure.

We had already confirmed that there was a successful backup from the night before. Plunketts Pharmacy is a regular maintenance client and therefore the backups are checked on a daily basis.

The main circuit board in the server had failed and could not be repaired. Considering the age of the server a replacement board was not economical and not feasible within one business day.

We decided to virtualize the environment from the hard drives of the faulty server. In other words, create a virtual machine of the existing system and provide a temporary server to run it.

Virtual machines run on a platform called a virtual host. We generally use Microsoft’s HyperV. Virtual machines are not hardware dependent because the host’s integrated services “translate” between the hardware and the virtual machine.

After the initial “physical to virtual conversion the virtual machines can be easily moved to another host. This also makes it easier to back the system up and perform disaster recovery.

Plunketts pharmacy had a usable system to go into the weekend with no data loss.

We then were able to plan for the implementation of the new server and because the system had already been virtualized this was done smoothly after hours a few weeks later as a scheduled outage.

Simone Lyon, Retail Manager commented
“Having our server crash was a very stressful and time-consuming event. Integer were very helpful in the process and came out straight away to get our system up and running again.

From a business perspective, we couldn’t access patient information, their history and pricing of their medication, along with the stock levels and details. It was invaluable to us as a business that Integer responded as fast as they did.”