Johns Hopkins unites its businesses with SAP and IBM

Johns Hopkins Institutions, comprising the Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System, Johns Hopkins University, and several other hospitals and institutions, is Maryland’s largest private employer, with more than 45,000 full-time staff. The Johns Hopkins Hospital has been rated as America’s number one hospital for 17 consecutive years, while the University is ranked first among US universities in receipt of federal research and development funds.

Running a multi-campus university and eight separate medical facilities is a complex operation, so Johns Hopkins has traditionally managed the University and Health Systems divisions separately. However, the IT infrastructure of both divisions is managed by a shared service organization known as ‘IT at Johns Hopkins’.

In the past, the two divisions ran and developed their own IT systems, which were often managed at the institutional level rather than the group level. The IT at Johns Hopkins team found that they were managing a very large number of applications from different vendors, often poorly integrated. It was very difficult to get an overall view of operations, especially if they wanted to look at the University and the Health Systems divisions as a whole.

To resolve these issues, IT at Johns Hopkins wanted to find a single, centralized ERP platform that would help rationalize the entire IT landscape and provide a ‘single source of truth’ – improving data quality and providing faster, more accurate reporting.

Making the right choice of ERP platform

Over the course of six months, Johns Hopkins performed a full review of enterprise-level ERP vendors, including a detailed requirements-gathering exercise to decide on the best option for the business.

A large-scale ERP implementation is one of the most challenging projects that an organization like Johns Hopkins can undertake – not just from a technology point of view, but because all the core business processes need to be realigned.

Lisa Poremski, Client Representative for Johns Hopkins at IBM, comments: “Johns Hopkins wanted a product that would offer the closest possible out-of-the-box fit with their business.”

Johns Hopkins chose to work with BearingPoint to deploy the SAP applications. Before the software implementation could begin, however, Johns Hopkins needed to decide on a new hardware infrastructure to support the ERP platform.

Leveraging IBM Power

Working with IBM Global Technology Services, the IT at Johns Hopkins team deployed a number of IBM Power 570 servers running IBM AIX. The main production databases for the SAP application environment run on two machines in the primary data center, with a third machine using IBM PowerHA high availability clustering (formerly known as HACMP) to provide a failover option in case one of the other servers fails.

IBM PowerVM dynamic resource distribution can automatically adapt hardware resources to the new workload in accordance with predefined priority levels, if there is a PowerHA failover. This leads to more efficient utilization of the hardware and better Service Level Agreement (SLA) performance.

Another Power 570, located at the secondary data center, provides disaster recovery support, and acts as a quality assurance environment during day-to-day operations. Several other Power servers run the production SAP applications, as well as a development environment and a sandbox.

Lisa Poremski comments: “Even though Johns Hopkins runs more than 100 virtualized LPARs for the SAP application environment, the AIX environment, hypervisor and hardware management console make it simple to manage them. And when they need to set up a new system for one of their business units, PowerVM virtualization makes it quick and easy – there’s no need to buy more hardware or plug in more cables.”

Another feature of the IBM Power platform is the easy scalability provided by IBM Capacity on Demand. When more processing capacity is needed, Johns Hopkins can temporarily switch on additional processors within the Power 570 servers – and it only pays for the extra processors when it is using them.

Looking ahead to POWER6™

“In addition to new resilience features like Live Partition Mobility, POWER6 should deliver greatly improved energy efficiency, which is a major consideration,” explains Lisa Poremski. “Aside from the rising cost of electricity, there is only so much power that can be fed into the Johns Hopkins data centers, so efficiency is vital. Moreover, Johns Hopkins has a number of corporate environmental objectives, and Green IT is becoming an increasingly important issue.”

High-performance storage

To support the IBM Power servers, Johns Hopkins worked with IBM Global Technology Services to build a storage area network (SAN) based on the IBM System Storage DS8300 platform. The DS8300 is a massively scalable disk system that supports fiber channel connectivity at up to 4Gbps. Using a mixture of high-speed and high-capacity disks, enterprises like Johns Hopkins can create a storage profile that offers the optimum combination of performance and cost-efficiency.

“The DS8300 is an excellent basis for the kind of high-performance storage environment that SAP ERP applications require,” explains Lisa Poremski. “The built-in storage management software is easy to use and highly flexible, and capabilities like IBM FlashCopy are ideal for making point-in-time copies of business-critical SAP databases.”

Successful ERP implementation

With the servers and storage in place, Johns Hopkins and Bearing Point were able to complete the implementation of the SAP ERP applications using SAP NetWeaver Exchange Infrastructure to create more than 150 interfaces with other systems within the hospital and university infrastructure.

“IT at Johns Hopkins was able to roll out the software to the entire organization within two years,” comments Lisa Poremski. “The biggest challenge is not technical at all – it is to drive the culture change and get Johns Hopkins’ 15,000 users to work with the new applications effectively.

“IBM Global Technology Services, BearingPoint and the in-house team all played an important role in the success of this major IT initiative,” concludes Lisa Poremski. “The IBM Power servers and DS8300 systems deliver industry-leading performance and near-100 per cent availability for the SAP ERP environment – ensuring that Johns Hopkins’ users can access the IT systems they need, whenever they need them.”