High Availability in the Cloud with MD Link

High Availability in the Cloud with MD Link

MDI Solutions has reached a milestone in the persistence capability of their MD Link Integration Engine software. The MDI development team deployed MD Link on 2 (two) independent servers via Amazon’s Cloud service and successfully tested their high-availability (HA) failover solution for MD Link.

MD Link was installed on 2 servers in the Cloud, in a ‘failover cluster’ (the Microsoft term for high-availability). In the two-node setup, one machine was shut down manually (to simulate a server crash) and message traffic was virtually uninterrupted (downtime was mere seconds) before MD Link reinitialized on the other machine and resumed processing. The machine/server changeover was automatic and the Cloud service can provide an alternative to traditional server deployment. MDI anticipates that the HA setup in MD Link will be an invaluable feature for their hospital based users.

Along with managing service disruption due to hardware failures, MD Link’s adapters have many options for dealing with network disruptions, and the architecture of the engine is built to deal with prolonged outages gracefully – internal input queues scale infinitely and use very little space, while email alerts can be configured to notify staff of input queue sizes or loss of HL7 connectivity. Backup systems are not synchronized or replicated in the MD Link architecture – a straightforward active/passive setup is used with shared storage (which would be made highly available via RAID or similar set up).

MDI Solutions continues to expand the versatility and ‘ease-of-use’ of their market leading integration tools and will be exhibiting their full range of healthcare software and services at this year’s HealthAchieve conference in Toronto.