Community Health Network (CHN) is one of the nation’s leading healthcare providers of an all-digital hospital. Great idea, right? Not having to wait around in an ER for less than stellar service from a stranger with an MD sounds incredibly appealing. This type of healthcare combined with all the new medical technology advancements has healthcare data storage needs climbing faster than ever before.
Challenge: Downtime and Data Availability
CHN’s challenge was their reliance of their on-premises data servers. Outages could cause major problems for effective patient care and that is unacceptable for CHN’s medical providers. CHN wanted to be able to manage their storage, migrate data and implement new storage without any downtime–all without the option of the long weekend window. Within the last 10 years, the volume of storage needed for each patient has grown significantly larger due to the increase of digital images associated with each person’s medical records. And although CHN is a forerunner of healthcare innovation, they are not immune to HIPAA regulations. Every electronic medical record (EHR), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), and Computer Tomography (CT-scan) must be available to the provider in order for them to dispense the proper medical care for patients in a timely manner. Since the need for medical attention and healthcare isn’t always convenient, CHN needed to scale their storage capacity considerably while simultaneously serving their patient’s needs 24/7/365.
DataCore Software-Defined Storage benefits both provider and patients alike
In order to address the challenges at CHN, DataCore deployed multi-site data protection and failover system so CHN could meet the needs of their patients. The system increased the availability of CHN’s data by synchronously mirroring between two sites—the Carmel campus and the Lifeline data center using a host-based cluster model. This setup is to ensure data continuity in the event of site-specific outages. The server at either of these installations can automatically fail-over to the other without the user even knowing there was a fail at all.
The use of DataCore Software-Defined Storage resulted in providing CHN with a highly available infrastructure, improved application processing, and the total elimination of storage related downtime. Considering that CHN is using the SANsymphony software to virtualize and manage over 450TBs of data, with an environment supporting 14,000+ users, the seamless availability of all that data is certainly impressive. The bonus of this particular case study at Community Health Network is improved patient care and a more efficient healthcare organization—for patient and provider alike.
Read the full story on the Community Health Network case study.
