my in office server blew out two drives today... Can't pull up EMR data for a day until new drives arrive. My IT guy recommends a virtual server on top of my in house serves for days like this or any future catastrophes. Anybody with experience and aware of costs for initiation....
Hello,
Sorry for the technical issues and hope you recover soon with minimal (zero) data and monetary loss. I'm a current/former system administrator/developer, mostly in medium sized corporations, and not in the health care industry, but the concepts are identical. Only difference would be HIPAA compliance, mostly.
Truthfully, one would need a lot more information on your situation to accurately answer your question, such as the entire architecture/infrastructure layout and exactly what failed. For example, is your EMR software all in one server? Or do you have multiple servers, say, one for the EMR, and some back-end storage for patient data? Does your EMR have separate application and database servers?
All that said, I can only speak generically without knowing extreme details of your office's layout and expertise in your EMR platform and what it can handle. Whether a server is physical or virtual,
in and of themselves, doesn't really help in disasters. If the server fails, it's down (i.e., single point of failure). To ensure uptime and high availability, many servers use RAID so that when drive failures occur (even multiple drives if set up correctly), you'll experience no downtime and the drives can be replaced as if nothing happened. In addition to redundancy, backup is critical (RAID is not a backup), so I hope there is a secure, automated backup process that backs up all your important data locally (on site) as well as off site in the event of fire, theft, malware, or other disaster.
Where virtualization can help is in cost savings, but if it's just 1-2 servers or a tiny office environment, it may not be worth the initial cost and complexity over just physical servers.
Specifically, you could have a "cluster" of load-balanced EMR servers physically in your office so that if one goes down, the other server takes over the load with no noticeable down time. You can also have one (or more) EMR servers in your office and one (or more) EMR servers at another physical location (another office, a co-located datacenter that you rent, or even hosted in someone else's datacenter on the Internet)....
Couple options when you have multiple locations:
1) Active-Active: Your EMR runs in both locations simultaneously, sharing the load 50%-50%. If either one fails, the other one immediately takes on the full load (100%) until the other one can be repaired.
2) Active-Passive: Your EMR runs in one location; say your in-office server handles 100% and the passive location handles 0% but it's standing by listening. If something happens to your primary environment (like what happened to you), you can automatically or manually switch to your passive site and make it active, (basically a switcheroo) so you can repair the broken site.
But once again, physical vs. virtual server is a somewhat separate conversation. A virtual server still has to physically live on a physical server, and one of the key decisions is whether you own the physical servers yourself or whether you rent them (such as on the Internet). It's possible your IT guy was referring to renting a virtual server on the Internet (so a lot of the technical maintenance is done for you), and you simply have to set up the load-balancing between your primary datacenter (i.e., your office), and your secondary datacenter (the virtual server in the Internet). This all depends on what your EMR software can handle, and price depends on resources like CPU/RAM/Storage/network traffic/reputation/Service Level Agreement).
Apologies for rambling but don't have enough information to answer specifically on price.
