Case Study: Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center achieves cost-effective, cloud-integrated disaster recovery and IT cost savings with Microsoft Azure

Medical Center Gains Cost-Effective Disaster Recovery, IT Cost Savings with Upgrade

Dartmouth‑Hitchcock Medical Center, a large regional healthcare system, faced a growing dependence on IT for patient care and needed uninterrupted data‑center availability without significantly increasing staff or costs. With nearly 600 virtual machines and critical clinical workloads, the organization required a low‑cost, highly resilient disaster recovery solution but found traditional SAN replication too expensive and operationally complex.

By upgrading to Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2 and deploying Hyper‑V Replica together with Azure Site Recovery and Azure Backup, DHMC established a cloud‑integrated DR plan with near‑real‑time replication and orchestrated failover. The solution reduced recovery time to about one hour, avoided roughly $89,000/year in SAN replication costs, cut routine maintenance downtime (e.g., disk expansion from ~30 minutes to 2 minutes), allowed continued growth from 400 to 600 VMs without new hires, and improved IT staff efficiency and retention.

Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center

Robert McShinsky

Senior Systems Engineer