The characteristics of how data is created and retained have changed dramatically for both consumers and businesses. More digital information is being created and stored at present than the collective data of ALL previous centuries. Advancement in applications, data correlation, and interface technologies are rapidly changing how we use, capture, and reference information. As incredible as these advancements have been, the underlying data infrastructure has often not adapted accordingly. Impacts to businesses intelligence, application availability, and continuity will compound over time until the underlying data infrastructure is capable of meeting these ever-changing needs and characteristics. Our HealthDynamix team can help you to understand how your current issues are being affected by your present technology, and then create a progressive data architecture roadmap to address these same issues.

The Economies of Storage Solutions

Top among issues in healthcare organizations today are poor performing applications and lack of information management. Data center expenditures are expected to become the largest IT cost center within organizations, thus highlighting the need for significant data center transformation. Current statistics show that data center storage is nearly 100% allocated, while the utilization of that storage is less than 50%. Virtualization, dynamic provisioning, tiered management, and information life cycle management are all key areas of consideration. Being able to bundle performance, virtualization, and dynamic provisioning functionality in your storage architecture will be essential in controlling costs, addressing poorly performing applications, and providing true quality of service to these applications. Our HealthDynamix professionals will help determine the current economics and performance of your data infrastructure and will make recommendations that help your organization become more empowered to address its needs.

Is your organization’s IT department experiencing:

• Exponential data growth

• Difficulty managing your IT budget

• Issues with storage forecasting

• Decreased application performance

• Increased complexity in managing your existing environment

• Costly and painful data migration

For these organizations, storage virtualization and thin provisioning can have a positive impact.

Many organizations spend time forecasting their storage needs one application at a time, only to find that forecasts are inaccurate. Unfortunately, with this forecasting model, the only way to safely address demand is to over-allocate storage resources. As a result, most organizations have a fully allocated storage infrastructure, stranded islands of application storage, and utilization levels that often fall below 50%. Thin provisioning allows for:

• Use of storage resources in aggregate

• Focused forecasting per pool of storage

• Automated allocation to applications as the need occurs

Thin provisioning greatly reduces administrative burdens and issues with performance. With storage allocation relating directly to application-write activity, an efficient vehicle for adding additional storage is needed. Virtualization provides this vehicle by allowing administrators to quickly expand logical, larger volumes, and reduce the current complexity of storage planning, configuration, and array mapping.

Virtualization also enables seamless data movement written through the various tiers of storage – regardless of platform similarity. By efficiently allocating storage, freeing-up stranded storage, and locating data on the appropriate matched tiers, organizations can save substantially on hardware and labor costs. Buying-back unused storage creates quick ROI through cost-avoidance for upcoming storage growth costs.

Updating Legacy Systems for Modern Workflows

Many hospitals also experience disparity when managing multiple storage arrays that were driven into the environment by medical application providers. Multiple system interfaces, lack of integration, and complexity in data migration weaken an organization’s ability to create an efficient, cost-effective, smoothly functioning data infrastructure. Our HealthDynamix professionals will work with you to understand these technologies, the impact you can expect, and the solution options available to begin the empowerment process of delivering of storage services in your organization.

Significant expenses, long-term data issues, and risks in healthcare are directly related to backup and tape system technologies in use today. Backup windows are too long, restorations from tape are problematic, and data migration for long-term retention is costly. Sensitive patient and organizational data is often unencrypted when written to tape, resulting in greater problems. Offsite storage services are often used for retention, increasing both the current cost of ownership, and possible future cost of litigation from data theft. Many healthcare executives do not realize the risk or the waste associated with tape; in many cases the data being protected and preserved is redundant, non-essential, and uncompressed. For example, if a text document is generated and emailed to twenty employees, it is often backed up twenty times regardless of its true relevance to patients or regulations.

Breaking Free from Past Processes

De-duplication, compression, and encryption technologies can greatly reduce the backup footprint and improve the security applied to this tier of storage. Our HealthDynamix specialists can work with your organization not only to evaluate these technologies, but also to analyze the business case for breaking free from tape. Changes in storage technology and manufacturing costs have enabled many to move their tape infrastructures to cost-effective online stores, thereby improving recovery, long-term retention, and migration.

Multiple clinical systems generating a variety of data in different modality formats are operating within every healthcare organization. In many cases, the clinical software provider offers an attached storage solution that then creates a variety of system platforms and data repositories throughout a healthcare organization. Placement of data is often tied to the application, rather than the best platform, making a consolidated approach to data management complex or unachievable. In recent years, many organizations have found it difficult to consolidate these various modalities due to the lack of compatibility between the storage vendors and the clinical applications. Many of these connectors have been written in a proprietary format while data is encapsulated and stored with proprietary wrappers. This creates platform lock-in making it costly and complex to migrate data or consider other technology options more suited to the organization’s needs.

Large File Sizes and Tiered Storage Misfiles

The enormous number of images created, combined with the long-term requirements for healthcare, makes it necessary to consolidate storage platforms, create near line archives, and apply information lifecycle management holistically. Simple monochrome videos, (e.g., cardiac angiography) can require 1GB of storage per occurrence. After creation and generation, images such as these are considered “fixed content” and should be stored on lower, more cost effective tiers of storage. In many cases however, fixed images such as these will be retained on the higher tiers of storage since there is no automation to move the data to another tier, or simply because the system repository is isolated from the main data architecture.

Our HealthDynamix specialists can work with your organization to achieve application independence and store/manage your data in the context of an enterprise-wide management approach. This approach to clinical and non-clinical data management, improves the cost and efficiency associated with your data platforms and with the accessibility of your information.