Hospitals and health systems are benefitting from an explosion of information technologies to help run their facilities, improve patient care and keep costs contained. And with this influx of data comes an enormous responsibility for hospital IT teams to manage the rapidly growing pool of healthcare information so that it is secure and compliant, is always accessible, and isn’t compromised.
Be it digital patient data in the form of electronic health records (EHR) and electronic medical records (EMR), research and medical imaging, or video surveillance footage, healthcare institutions need a reliable means to store, protect, and access data.
Flexible Data Storage Solutions to Match Your Healthcare IT Requirements
DataCore provides enterprise-class Software-Defined Storage (SDS) solutions for hospitals and healthcare organizations to ensure high data availability.
With DataCore, a medical practitioner or caregiver is always able to get access to the data that they need, ensuring no disruption to patient care and driving positive health outcomes.
Allowing unparalleled flexibility to expand and modernize your storage infrastructure with a vendor-neutral hardware approach, DataCore helps healthcare IT departments optimize storage spend and reduce TCO. Thousands of hospitals around the world benefit from using DataCore to address mission-critical healthcare IT challenges while maximizing the availability, performance, and utilization of IT resources.
For high-performance SAN and hyperconverged infrastructures
- Ensure continuous operations of your hospital information systems (HIS) by avoiding storage-related downtime
- Optimize and protect existing storage investments and reduce costs
- Improve responsiveness of storage to support EHR/EMR applications
- Modernize healthcare IT infrastructure with ease (painless data migrations, ultimate hardware flexibility)
For scalable data access, delivery, and archive
- Store and protect your growing data on economical on-premises S3-accessible object storage
- Enable on-demand access to digital assets from a resilient vendor neutral archive (VNA)
- Help shield against attacks via configurable data immutability and WORM
We have looked at a lot of different technologies. The capabilities of DataCore’s software-defined storage offering not only align with our uncompromising standards but allow us to continue to deliver patient care seamlessly without interruption, which is critical to our mission.
Because we are a small IT staff, we wear a lot of hats—and we get pulled in a lot of directions. As a result, DataCore’s simplicity of management and ease-of-use is just as important to us as its cost-effectiveness and overall performance. When our team is called on to handle IT for multiple facilities, we can put whatever systems the newly acquired hospitals have under our existing infrastructure—because we have a software-defined infrastructure that will support this growth.
High availability was the first and foremost reason for going with DataCore—and for continuing with it. Now, everything that is mission-critical to the running of the hospital is supported by the DataCore software-defined storage platform. Users not only receive faster access to data, but they benefit from more server capacity as well.
Addressing The Key Challenges for Healthcare IT Departments
Meeting the Need for Real-Time, 24/7 Data Availability and Accessibility
How DataCore SANsymphony can help:
- Reduce disruptions and achieve zero downtime, with zero recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO). Using a combination of synchronous mirroring and asynchronous replication techniques, data copies can be created locally or hundreds of miles away. Automatic failover and failback mechanisms ensure business continuity.
- In the event of a ransomware attack or other security incidents causing data loss, Continuous Data Protection (CDP) restores data to any point in time, even seconds before the attack, minimizing operational impact.
- Easily add/change/decommission storage gear and integrate new technology (such as NVMe) into your hospital IT infrastructure without disruption to healthcare operations.
- Seamlessly migrate data between disparate storage systems without incurring downtime or undertaking expensive forklift operations.
Managing and Consolidating Data from Disparate Legacy Systems
How DataCore SANsymphony can help:
- Create a virtualized storage pool that abstracts your storage infrastructure from disparate vendors into one common set of enterprise-wide services.
- Following a merger or acquisition, the vendor-agnostic SANsymphony gathers a hospital system’s collective resources, managing them centrally and uniformly despite differences in hardware make and model, specification, configuration, and deployment.
- Automated data tiering across diverse storage systems ensures the applications that require higher performance always have access to the fastest hardware, without the need for manual data migrations or human intervention.
Ensuring a Rapidly Scaling Medical Data Archive is Instantly and Securely Available
How DataCore Swarm can help:
- Build a securely accessible medical data archive on-premises that can scale from Terabytes to Petabytes on any mix of standard servers.
- Scale from simple user-based access to full role-based access control (RBAC) leveraging Active Directory, LDAP, PAM, token-based authentication or SAML 2.0.
- Simplify storage administration and user access to data via a robust and intuitive web-based console.
Enabling Compliance and Shielding Medical Data from Malicious Attacks
How DataCore Swarm can help:
- Avoid accidental file deletion and protect from ransomware and malware attacks with customizable immutability or WORM data protection.
- Secure data transfer via HTTPS in-flight with the option for full-volume AES-256-encryption at rest.
- Track content access and versions for auditing while ensuring data integrity via Integrity Seals.
- Automate the replication of data for disaster recovery (DR) purposes to Amazon Glacier or any S3-enabled service.
National Institutes of Health (NIH) uses Swarm to store and protect National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) data on a single archive for long-term retention with immediate access.
St. Jude leverages Swarm integrated and configurable Disaster Recovery features and can now upgrade storage independent of PACs applications enabling their Vendor Neutral Archive.
The Department of Defense consolidates medical images from hundreds of geographically distributed sites—leveraging file-level governance and long-term durability that enables their Vendor Neutral Archive.
Cost Savings & Planning Around the Healthcare Data Tsunami
How DataCore Software-Defined Storage can help:
- Unify how you provision capacity, control data placement, and ensure data protection across your diverse storage infrastructure.
- Extend the life of existing storage while gaining the clout to negotiate the best price for new hardware.
- Lower your costs by automatically migrating less critical data to cheaper storage.
By providing a virtual storage pool that abstracts storage from different vendors’ systems and dynamically assigns workloads to optimal storage tiers based on performance requirements, DataCore enables hospitals to scale up or scale out applications while efficiently using all available resources.
Resources: How to Address Your Healthcare Data Storage Challenges
Learn how DataCore can help your team address your healthcare organization’s most pressing storage challenges and how we deliver on our technical promises.
