Server Upgrade, Houston

Texas Children’s Hospital, a leader in the Healthcare and Medical Industry, needed the services of a server engineer to upgrade their five server web farm to new servers. The upgrade would take the Healthcare provider from Server 2003 and IIS6 to Server 2008 x64 and IIS7. The web content would need to be automatically replicated between the two primary servers and from the staging web server to the two primary servers as well.

In conjunction with Treadstone Consulting, Elevated Technologies assisted with a seamless transition throughout the Server Upgrade for the server cluster. We migrated a copy of the data on each server to the new server within the same role in the new web farm. This new web farm included a development server, staging server, video server, and two primary public facing web servers. The two primary servers were load balanced using an F5 hardware load balancer, and we used RepliWeb software to automate data replication between the staging server and primary servers. The software was also used to automate the replication of IIS7 configurations and data between the primary servers. As a result of these efforts, the Texas children’s Hospital web farm was upgraded to a new, faster, and more secure hardware option with zero downtime for the public websites. Data replication has also been automated, increasing efficiency for the organization’s web support team. In addition, consolidated servers were able to reduce costs during the server upgrade.