McKesson Corporation dominates the healthcare industry in North America as its largest pharmaceutical distributor and the leading U.S. healthcare services and information technology company. In fact, McKesson technologies operate in more than half of the U.S.’s hospitals with more than 200 beds, helping healthcare providers make patient care safer and reasonably priced. McKesson, which ranks 16th on the FORTUNE 500 with more than US$88 billion in annual revenue, is growing further by acquisitions.

McKesson’s clearinghouse provides automated ways for providers, payers, and patients to collaborate. One of the most important systems in McKesson’s clearinghouse is the multi-instance, 4 TB Oracle® database, which ties to most business technologies in RelayHealth, McKesson’s vendor-neutral connectivity services business. A cluster of HP 9000 rp5470 Servers with PA-RISC processors and HP-UX 11i v2 previously supported this platform.

However, at nearly 100 percent utilisation, the servers’ memory and CPU capacity became overextended. Problems occurred whenever the staff powered down the servers, either to add storage capacity, bring new customers on the system, or make other adjustments. That’s when virtually every other system connected with the database – from external customer services to services account management – would incur an outage.

Increase resources and improve availability for the Oracle® 10g Real Application Clusters (RAC) production, development, and quality assurance databases

'Given the performance benefits that we saw in our smaller application migrations, we were very confident in the price-performance benefits of Integrity servers [with Dual-Core Intel® Itanium® 2 processors]. It’s a logical platform upgrade from PA-RISC'.

- Tod Wiederholt, Manager of Systems Development for RelayHealth, McKesson Corporation