The new business continuity Downtime no more Remembering every instant in time The MPLS answer IT monitoring with a twist Your opinion: Talk it up The new data center by the numbers Awesome in Austin Filling the app gap

St. Luke's Health System, Kansas City, Mo.

At St. Luke's Health System, the mission is to become paperless. Under the direction of manager Harold Sirls, the company moved from a mainframe network to a newly built, state-of-the-art data center equipped with a mix of Unix and Windows environments. The data center supports the sharing of hundreds of gigabytes of information daily, including digital imagery, among medical professions across the Midwest. Some highlights of the new design:

•  Hosts real-time streaming video for intensive care patient monitoring.

•  Features 24/7 network and security monitoring, as well as sophisticated disaster recovery and failover technology.

•  Uses open source applications and Windows platforms to enable cross-training of data center IT team.

•  Acts as the hub of a 100-mile SONET ring.

FreshDirect, Long Island, N.Y.

FreshDirect, an online fresh food manufacturing and delivery services outlet, was spinning its wheels with its legacy architecture of RISC servers. The company had big expansion plans for its e-commerce business, so CTO Myles Trachtenberg spearheaded a complete overhaul of the company's data center. The lynchpin of the new design is the use of open source Egenera blade servers and VMware virtualization software to support FreshDirect's Oracle, BEA Systems and Apache e-commerce applications. With Trachtenberg's bold initiative, the company has seen impressive results such as:

•  Checkout time for customers reduced from 14 seconds to 1.5 seconds.

•  Software upgrades that used to take up to five hours and require a full system shutdown now can be done on-the-fly in less than 30 minutes.

•  The company claims $1.2 million in savings in licensing fees and administration costs.

Massachusetts Department of Revenue, Boston

The Massachusetts Department of Revenue recently retooled its online filing and payment system for taxpayers. At the heart of the "WebFile for Business" project is a significant redesign of the agency's data center to support Web services . The DOR has been able to process almost 700,000 tax returns and $2 billion in payments in the first 10 months of operations. The DOR employed sophisticated security techniques to protect vulnerable Web-based architecture: