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GoldenGate Software Partners with Cerner Corporation
Overview
GoldenGate Software and Cerner Corporation partner to improve the availability and accessibility of
Cerner's healthcare applications. Initially, Cerner leveraged GoldenGate Software's Zero-Downtime
Operations solution to migrate Cerner Millennium® clients from the OpenVMS operating system to
either IBM AIX or HP-UX. Within the same migration window, Cerner also leveraged GoldenGate
Zero-Downtime Operations to upgrade clients from Oracle 9i to 10g with minimal downtime. After
performing a number of successful migrations for both hosted and self-hosted clients, Cerner
expanded its use of GoldenGate's technology solutions to include GoldenGate Live Standby and
GoldenGate Live Reporting solutions.
GoldenGate Zero-Downtime Operations
for Cerner's migration activities
Cerner regularly upgrades customers from Oracle 9i to Oracle 10g, along with a database rebuild to
reorganize the database. Cerner also migrates its customers from OpenVMS to IBM AIX or HP-UX,
allowing the OpenVMS-Alpha servers to be re-allocated to the Millennium Application-Tier or Non-
Production configuration to maximize hardware investments.
To reduce the several-day downtime normally associated with such migrations, Cerner turned to
GoldenGate's Zero-Downtime Operations solution, which provides real-time, heterogeneous, and
bi-directional data movement between new and old systems to eliminate the downtime related to
migrations, maintenance, and upgrades. By leveraging GoldenGate's Zero-Downtime Operations
solution across numerous platform migrations, Cerner was able to reduce the planned downtime per
migration from days to less than two hours.
GoldenGate Live Standby for Cerner Millennium®
GoldenGate also provides solutions for unplanned outages, such as those resulting from system or data
failures. GoldenGate's Live Standby solution provides continuous data availability for business-critical
systems by capturing transactional data from the primary system and applying it to a standby system
in real time. By deploying GoldenGate's Live Standby solution with Cerner Millennium, customers can
failover the primary Millennium environment to a secondary site with a minimal outage.
With bi-directional data replication capabilities, GoldenGate captures changes in the secondary
database and updates the primary system as soon as it is available, to allow reverting back to the
primary system.
Cerner provides GoldenGate Live Standby along with Cerner's Disaster Recovery solution with
built-in reporting capabilities. Additionally, GoldenGate Director can be used to monitor GoldenGate
processes, and GoldenGate Veridata® can perform data comparison between active primary and
back-up databases to confirm that they are fully synchronized.
GoldenGate Live Reporting for Cerner Millennium®
In addition to high availability solutions, GoldenGate also offers real-time data integration solutions,
which leverage real-time change data capture technology to enable operational and analytical data
integration for the real-time enterprise. GoldenGate's Live Reporting solution significantly lowers
query overhead by off-loading reporting activity from the production database using log-based,
real-time, change data capture, transformation and delivery to a secondary, cost-effective reporting
environment.
A dedicated Millennium reporting environment uses this reporting database and removes the
reporting burden from the primary Millennium application environment. Having a separate reporting
database also provides greater flexibility for tuning the environment for reporting purposes.
GoldenGate maintains transaction integrity as data is moved and can selectively deliver tables,
rows, and columns of production data pertinent to analytical activity to the secondary system. With
GoldenGate's Live Reporting solution, Millennium users have access to the most up-to-date and
accurate patient data to offer better patient care.
GoldenGate Live Reporting for Cerner's
724Access solution
Cerner leverages solutions from GoldenGate to support its 724Access solution, which is a last line
of defense designed to minimize workflow disruptions to clinicians by providing read-only access to
clinical data during scheduled or unscheduled Cerner Millennium outages. The 724Access solution
contains two separate databases: One is a full copy of the production Millennium Oracle database
that can be accessed in read-only mode through a separate Cerner Millennium environment, when
the primary system is unavailable but networking is still available. The other is a MySQL database that
runs locally on desktop PCs throughout the hospital, when both the primary system and the network
are unavailable.
GoldenGate provides the underlying data integration technology that allows continuous feeds from the
Millennium source systems on Oracle to the Oracle and MySQL databases running the 724Access
solution. Previously, users of this solution (formerly known as PCLA) had access to the patient data,
but it generally ran 30 minutes behind. Supported by GoldenGate, 724Access can be available within
minutes after any planned or unplanned outage.
In a critical hospital environment, doctors, nurses, and clinicians need continuous access to the most
up-to-date patient information, and meeting this need is the primary value of GoldenGate's real-time
data integration capabilities for Cerner and its customers.
About Cerner
Cerner is taking the paper chart out of healthcare,
eliminating error, variance and waste in the care process.
With more than 6,000 clients worldwide, Cerner is the
leading supplier of healthcare information technology.
The following are trademarks of Cerner: Cerner, Cerner’s
logo, Cerner Millennium, Cerner PowerChart and
Discern. NASDAQ: CERN. For more information about
Cerner, please visit our Web site at www.cerner.com.
About GoldenGate
GoldenGate Software Inc. is a leading provider of high
availability and real-time data integration solutions for
improving the availability, accessibility and performance
of critical data across heterogeneous enterprise IT
environments. GoldenGate supports many industry
verticals including banking, telecommunications, retail,
government and healthcare. More than 500 customers
worldwide, including Adventist Health System, Kettering
Health Network, Legacy Health, Montefiore Medical
Center, OSF Healthcare, Park Nicollet and Thomas
Jefferson University Hospital rely on GoldenGate solutions.