News release

Compaq IT Solution Just What the Doctor Ordered

StorageWorks Solution Recreates Health Care System's Technology Infrastructure, Provides Cornerstone Technology for Baptist Memorial's New State-of-the-Art Facility

Moving the IT data center of an entire hospital system is never an easy job. When Baptist Memorial Health Care Corp. in Memphis, Tennessee decided to relocate to its new, state-of-the-art East Memphis location, the health care organization's IT staff recognized that the process would require skill and precision.

After evaluating all of the leading enterprise vendors, Baptist selected Compaq Computer Corporation (NYSE: CPQ) for its $5 million investment in a new information technology system that consolidates hospital and medical group systems for greater efficiency and easier expansion.

Baptist's IT staff worked collaboratively with the Compaq enterprise sales teams and professionals from Pomeroy Computer Resources to develop a game plan for the IT infrastructure. Baptist wanted to replace technology that was more than 10 years old. The health care organization needed to refresh the existing technology system, which cost many times the dollar investment for this new system.

The backbone of the system is a new Compaq SAN-based enterprise storage network that will allow Baptist to build out its IT infrastructure in phases as is required by the rapid growth of data, created by new imaging such as radiology systems and scanned medical systems.

"Compaq's value-based approach appealed to Baptist particularly because of the growth the health care system has seen recently," said Mark Gonzalez, vice president North America, Compaq Enterprise Storage Group. "The architecture of our StorageWorks system allows Baptist to make the most of the resources they have, hardware as well as software. Modularity and scalability are core benefits of our strategy. With the management software tools Baptist has now, including StorageWorks Enterprise Backup Solution and the StorageWorks Modular Data Router, the staff will be able to handle growth efficiently."

Jeff Bell, administrative director of Technical Services for Baptist Information Systems, added: "When we started working with Compaq, we had four major goals. First, we needed a way to deal with the huge increase in the volume of data over the last eight years. Second, we wanted to decrease our risks of data loss during the process of moving our data center. Third, we wanted to minimize the amount of downtime during the move to our new data center by setting up new systems parallel to our older existing systems. Finally, we needed a way to deal with the issue of our fully depreciated Data General servers. Compaq was able to help us with all that.

"At Baptist, our number one priority is our patients," Bell continued. "As a not-for-profit health care provider, we needed an approach to our data center move that would help us be on time and under budget, with minimal downtime for our end users. By utilizing SAN technology, in some situations we have driven our cost per megabyte down from $2.50 to 20 cents. We have used this same technology to go from 48 hours to less than 12 hours of planned downtime. We considered proposals from several providers, and we found that Compaq could provide the best technology and performance, as well as the most cost-effective solutions."

Pomeroy, a national system integrator headquartered in Hebron, Ky., worked closely with Compaq and Baptist Memorial in the development and installation of the new infrastructure.

"Our customers have faith in Compaq's ability to develop innovative solutions and Pomeroy's ability to integrate the solutions, both today and in the future," said Tim Tonges, executive vice president, Pomeroy Computer Resources. "We're committed to working with Compaq to help customers like Baptist Memorial meet their IT challenges."

Compaq and Pomeroy developed the fault-tolerant solution for moving Baptist Health Care into a high-end SAN enterprise environment, which includes three TB of storage and over 64 servers. Part of this process was the integration of Compaq solutions including: ProLiant servers running Windows 2000, ProLiant servers running Novell NetWare, OpenVMS AlphaServer GS systems, and StorageWorks Fibre Channel SAN and SAN-based tape libraries.

About Baptist Memorial Health Care

Baptist Memorial Health Care is an integrated health care delivery system offering a full continuum of care to communities throughout the Mid-South region of West Tennessee, Mississippi and Eastern Arkansas. Baptist is home to many world-renowned physicians, and the system has received numerous national awards, such as being among U.S. News & World Report's Top 50 hospitals for orthopedics. With the intention of caring for people close to their homes, the Baptist network consists of 17 hospitals; more than 2,900 affiliated physicians; home, hospice and psychiatric care; minor medical clinics; a chain of surgery, rehabilitation and other outpatient centers; and an education system highlighted by the Baptist College of Health Sciences.

Baptist Information Systems was ranked No. 153 overall out of 500 top information technology departments nationwide and ranked 11th in the health and medical industry in InformationWeek magazine's 2001 IT Innovators survey/study. For more information, visit www.baptistonline.org.

About Compaq Enterprise Storage

Compaq, the number one global storage solutions supplier, is the leader in the development and delivery of the enterprise SAN. Recognized for its vision and ability to execute, Compaq is committed to driving radical simplification and investment protection for enterprise and SMB customers. By continuing to extend its Enterprise Network Storage Architecture (ENSA) in key areas such as virtualization, automation, universal network storage and life cycle data management, Compaq enables customers to efficiently manage complex, mixed storage environments. More information on StorageWorks and SANworks solutions is available at www.compaq.com/storage.

About Compaq

Founded in 1982, Compaq Computer Corporation is a leading global provider of enterprise technology and solutions. Compaq designs, develops, manufactures and markets hardware, software, solutions and services, including industry-leading enterprise storage and computing solutions, fault-tolerant business-critical solutions, communication products, and desktop and portable personal computers that are sold in more than 200 countries. Information on Compaq and its products and services is available at http://www.compaq.com.