Location: Washington, MO
Client: Mercy Health System
Size: $3,200,000
THE PROJECT
Mercy Health System’s Data Center in Washington Missouri was built to assure fully redundant availability of Mercy’s system electronic medical records (EMR) system throughout its entire medical network. The objective, to provide real time access to and storage of the health records of every patient served by 28-hospital network together with more than 1,500 Mercy affiliated medical practices. The Washington Data Center was designed to address an unprecedented demand for scale—in essence to provide Mercy with their own “cloud” capable of supporting operational access to all of their EMRs for the foreseeable future—and to get this done within a manageable budget. Guarantee Electrical Company’s Systems team was engaged to support the design and construction of the data network on which to run the data center, providing the fiber optic and structured cabling infrastructure capable of delivering assured, real time access and performance.
OUR WORK
As the systems installation contractor, Guarantee Electrical provided the connectivity to two separate sources of fiber optic network infrastructure to provide comparable A/B redundancy for the data side as that was supplied on the electrical side by providing for two separate utility connections. This of course provides “light-speed” connectivity between the data center and Mercy’s 28-hospital wide area network (WAN), etc. Within the data center itself, the fiber optic network involved pulling roughly three hundred ninety-six miles of fiber optic cabling, providing expandability to roughly three times the center’s current capacity provided by its newly installed 1200 blade servers. Supporting the fiber optic, vertical backbone, Guarantee installed the “horizontal” copper backbone supplying more than a million feet of CAT6 structured copper cabling within the facility to assure that the internal speeds of 10 Gigabits or better throughout the Center’s internal network.
SUCCESS
The Mercy Data Center was completed on time and within the overall $60 million budget of which $3.2 Million was dedicated to systems construction. In addition to its detailed constructability services that coordinated placement of electrical and systems equipment and devices with architectural and structural features, mechanical systems and equipment (piping, ductwork, plumbing and sprinkler lines), etc. GECO’s constructability team provided cost and viability analysis of numerous state-of-the-art control systems, network cabling products and schemes affecting communications in the facility as well as instrumentation for the Network Operating Center (NOC).