Overview
GoldenGate Software and Cerner Corporation partner to improve the availability and accessibility of Cerner's healthcare applications. Initially, Cerner leveraged GoldenGate Software's Zero-Downtime Operations solution to migrate Cerner Millennium® clients from the OpenVMS operating system to either IBM AIX or HP-UX. Within the same migration window, Cerner also leveraged GoldenGate Zero-Downtime Operations to upgrade clients from Oracle 9i to 10g with minimal downtime. After performing a number of successful migrations for both hosted and self-hosted clients, Cerner expanded its use of GoldenGate's technology solutions to include GoldenGate Live Standby and GoldenGate Live Reporting solutions.

GoldenGate Zero-Downtime Operations for Cerner's migration activities
Cerner regularly upgrades customers from Oracle 9i to Oracle 10g, along with a database rebuild to reorganize the database. Cerner also migrates its customers from OpenVMS to IBM AIX or HP-UX, allowing the OpenVMS-Alpha servers to be re-allocated to the Millennium Application-Tier or Non- Production configuration to maximize hardware investments. To reduce the several-day downtime normally associated with such migrations, Cerner turned to GoldenGate's Zero-Downtime Operations solution, which provides real-time, heterogeneous, and bi-directional data movement between new and old systems to eliminate the downtime related to migrations, maintenance, and upgrades. By leveraging GoldenGate's Zero-Downtime Operations solution across numerous platform migrations, Cerner was able to reduce the planned downtime per migration from days to less than two hours.

GoldenGate Live Standby for Cerner Millennium®
GoldenGate also provides solutions for unplanned outages, such as those resulting from system or data failures. GoldenGate's Live Standby solution provides continuous data availability for business-critical systems by capturing transactional data from the primary system and applying it to a standby system in real time. By deploying GoldenGate's Live Standby solution with Cerner Millennium, customers can failover the primary Millennium environment to a secondary site with a minimal outage. With bi-directional data replication capabilities, GoldenGate captures changes in the secondary database and updates the primary system as soon as it is available, to allow reverting back to the primary system. Cerner provides GoldenGate Live Standby along with Cerner's Disaster Recovery solution with built-in reporting capabilities. Additionally, GoldenGate Director can be used to monitor GoldenGate processes, and GoldenGate Veridata® can perform data comparison between active primary and back-up databases to confirm that they are fully synchronized.