Charles Wardrip

Charles Wardrip is Corporate Vice President of Operations and Telecommunications for Kindred Healthcare, Inc. As director of I/S Operations and Telecommunications, Charles oversees the daily operations of more than 1,500 computer systems. These systems primarily consist of Intel servers running Microsoft's NT operating system or IBM's RISC processors running their AIX UNIX operating system.

Approximately 700 of these servers are centrally located in Kindred’s Data Center with the remaining servers distributed in Kindred's 350+ facilities. These facilities are connected to the corporate data center by a frame relay wide-area-network (WAN) provided by Sprint. The servers within the Data Center are networked using CISCO Gigabit Ethernet switches and routers. Northern Telecom PBXs are installed at the corporate office and many of Kindred's facilities.

Many of the servers located in the Data Center are attached to storage using EMC's Symmetrix and Connectrix products forming a storage area network (SAN). IBM's tape management solution consisting of ADSM software and their 3494 Automatic Tape Library (ATL) is used to back up critical data to tape.

An enterprise systems monitoring application was implemented to monitor Kindred's servers, network and applications. Alerts are forwarded to a central operations control center staffed around the clock. This area is responsible for problem triage, resolution and escalation.