Dave Vellante, Co-founder of Wikibon, spoke with Steven Simpauco, Manager of Database Administration and John Tobin, Director of Database and Distribution Support, both of Sharp Healthcare at the Oracle Open World 2012 Customer Event. Sharp Healthcare is a customer to both Oracle and NetApp. They are the largest healthcare organization in San Diego with seven hospitals, two medical groups and their own HMO. They currently employ 15,000 people and 2,600 physicians. Sharp Healthcare has 30-plus large enterprise databases with NetApp being their primary database provider. Technology must be instant, a two-second delay is a long time for a physician to wait. Younger physicians are more adaptive and willing to embrace the new technology in the computer systems. Mobility is upcoming as the next phase, mobile apps will be useful for physicians to enter information bedside. Tobin points out, "We have an app store for our patient portal system, but we do not have one for the physicians yet." Healthcare is limited by the vendors' technology and dependent upon what they promote. Simpauco explains what has changed in the last five to ten years, "It's all about efficiency, performance and having the database data available. So we're always looking for ways to be flexible for high performance and for redundancy. With NetApp we have that agility to provide faster access to the data." Sharp Healthcare has partnered with Fuji to implement StorageGRID for redundancy. This will allow around-the-clock solutions. Tobin explains, "With the StorageGRID we're able to move all those servers centrally, into one central location, then send those dot-com images out to multiple disks at two different data centers." Liability is driving the movement to clustering in 2013. Simpauco confirms that they are utilizing the available efficiency features of NetApps. Tobin adds they are about 75% virtualized, using VMware for their SQL server environments, databases and applications. As far as what they like about NetApp, Tobin shares, "I like the tools that allows us to do snap cloning. We use that quite a bit to replicate databases so that we can create a reporting database to offload some of the reporting during the day, so that we have better performance on our production systems, our critical applications. I think what they can do better is integrate with Oracle on their RAC environment so that we can do restores, node-independent, instance-independant." The vision of Sharp Healthcare for the future is to secure "7/24" applications with zero downtime. Patient care is a series of life or death decisions based on information stored on a computer. Without the availability of a paper chart, data needs to be seamless and instantaneous.