Sun Announces Hospital Infrastructure Deals

Rush University Medical Center is scrapping its 20 legacy IT systems in favor of software from Epic Systems Corporation, and as part of the transition, the Chicago-based center will deploy infrastructure from Sun Microsystems.

Sun announced the deal on Nov. 28 at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America, along with a similar deal with the Detroit-based Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute.

Already well-known for its image-storing offerings in radiology, the technology company hopes to position itself along with IBM and Hewlett-Packard as a major provider of other hospital IT infrastructure.

Rush Medical chose to deploy the complete Sun system: the Solaris 10 Operating System, UltraSPARC IV processor-based Sun Fire servers and Sun StorageTek solutions.

Rush Medical was already using Sun products for its Unix infrastructure, said Michael Sorensen, senior director of IT, who chose Sun infrastructure after investigating other vendors.

Another factor, said Sorenson, was that Sun offers discounts to educational institutions, making the cost of its equipment somewhat less than its competitors.

Sorenson estimates the hospital is spending about $5.5 million on its back-end technology. To support Epic, Rush Medical is installing 200 servers with about 110TB of storage across its dozen or so buildings.

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