Patient health information and data represent one of the greatest assets for hospitals and health systems. In healthcare today, there is an explosion of data that hospitals are challenged with protecting as a result of proactive health approaches such as wearables, telemedicine, electronic health records (EHR), Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS), pharmacy data and more.
This information is valuable for its ability to be utilized to help hospitals refine care delivery, improve health outcomes and help providers realize new solutions for treatment. With this influx of new and critical data, hospital IT teams must safeguard information and plan for improved accessibility, scalability and performance while working within already tight budgets.
This “healthcare data tsunami” affects hospitals on a national scale, reaching rural, urban, large and small care facilities alike. The need for cost-effective, virtualized storage capacity that can be scaled to meet current and future data demands is more important than ever.
A solution to meet this challenge is hardware-agnostic data storage technology. Easy to fit into a hospital’s current IT infrastructure, hardware-agnostic software-defined data storage can scale capacity effortlessly to handle present and future data requirements.
Hospitals can avoid having to fully replace IT solutions or learn how to manage new technologies systems, thereby helping to maintain already tight budgets.
Software-Defined Storage Can Help Healthcare Manage the Data Tsunami in a Scalable and Cost-Effective Way
Software-defined storage (SDS) is a top choice for hospitals across the country that are looking to centralize and consolidate storage management across numerous, existing storage devices. This technology solution operates with virtually any type of storage – from commodity disks to faster flash-based arrays – without requiring users to have to learn a new management system for every mode.
SDS typically provides advanced storage services such as thin-provisioning, auto-tiering, and support for mirroring and replication. Just as important, once SDS is implemented, migrations become a thing of the past – adding or removing storage systems becomes simple and transparent to users and applications, dramatically lowering the time required to manage them.
For example, a San Fernando Valley, California, hospital was hit with the healthcare data tsunami and struggled to cope with the increasing complexity and inefficiencies associated with managing the influx. The demand for more capacity and more disk space within the direct-attached storage environment was growing, and the data center was running on older servers and out of date.
There were some virtualized VMware servers, but even those virtualized servers were supported by direct-attached storage. With a small IT staff and budget, they needed a solution that was cost-effective and easy to manage.
Today, the hospital has achieved the business continuity it needs by eliminating downtime with DataCore’s high-availability storage virtualization solution. By integrating DataCore into their legacy system, the hospital has been able to ensure that all major applications deliver significantly better performance.
The DataCore SDS solution also enables the IT team to leverage legacy storage and be well positioned for future growth to keep pace with the data tsunami. The software-defined infrastructure allows for simplicity of management and ease-of-use combined with cost-effectiveness and overall application performance improvement, which supports the hospital’s future growth initiatives.
Maximizing Healthcare IT Infrastructure Investments with Hardware-Agnostic Data Storage Solutions
To maximize healthcare IT infrastructure investments, hardware-agnostic data storage solutions such as DataCore’s SDS enable hospitals to generate more value from their existing storage assets and run more workloads with better performance and availability on far fewer servers (idle processors and stranded disk space are put to work).
By utilizing the infrastructure already in place, cost savings both direct and indirect are achieved. IT teams can easily provision more storage as needed, improve performance and capacity and seamlessly manage current and future technologies to avoid/defer technology refreshes and extend the value of existing investments.
In the meantime, check out our solution brief, Solving Healthcare IT Challenges with DataCore Software-Defined Storage, to discover more about the growing number of hospitals deploying DatCore’s SDS platform today!
