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"The ONStor NAS solution provides impressive data throughput and availability together with a much reduced management overhead, while the SUN/Storagetek SAN has future-proofed the data storage needs of the Trust for the next few years with plenty of scope for expansion, and anxiety about our back-up window is a thing of the past. Once we had overcome the challenges of data migration, the benefits of this solution became immediately apparent."
Simon Mortimore, Information Manager at the Royal Surrey County Hospital NHS Trust.
• Scalable NAS Gateway consolidates data, saves cost
• N-way clustering ensures continuous availability
• Open storage enhances purchasing flexibility
Scalability:
With their initial implementation at 20TB; scalability was critical to this hospital. The ONStor environment scales to 40 petabytes within a single storage pool, permanently freeing them from the management issues inherent in multiple storage silos.
Availability:
In the healthcare environment, data availability directly impacts the quality of patient care. ONStor's n-way clustering architecture provides multiple levels of redundancy to ensure that data is always available.
Open Storage:
One objective of the hospital's IT managers was to leverage their existing storage hardware and software. ONStor gave them that flexibility with the industry's widest interoperability matrix.
 Cost:
ONStor offered an acquisition cost 65% lower than the competing NAS appliance vendors.
The combination of these elements led this healthcare provider to select ONStor NAS Gateways. With simplified their diverse storage environments consolidated, the IT manager's and the doctor's enjoy rapid access to information, and the patients ultimately receive faster, more effective care.
This regional healthcare provider was expanding its diagnostic capabilities with radiology and cardiology PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication Systems) from two different suppliers: GE and Heartlab. These new PACS would require a lot of capacity – starting at over 20 terabytes – and the hospital's IT managers sought the most efficient and reliable storage solution.
The accepted industry practice was to house data in separate silos, one for each PACS. That would have meant two new storage environments in addition to the McKesson Health Information System already in place. Managing three separate pools of storage within a single facility seemed highly inefficient, so the hospital's IT managers sought a better approach.
The high cost of conventional NAS appliances:
After surveying the options, NAS appeared to be the clear choice for PACS data consolidation. Since NAS employs open-standard communication protocols (CIFS and NFS), it is compatible with their PACS and HIS environments.
Furthermore, these protocols would make it simple and secure for remote users (such as physicians and clinics) to directly access data over IP. However conventional NAS appliances have three significant shortcomings in the view of these IT managers:
High acquisition cost:
The hospital's initial implementation required over 20TB of storage. The NAS appliance and the NAS heads alone would have cost nearly half a million dollars, not including storage.
Limited scalability:
When the PACS outgrew the capacity limitations of the initial NAS appliance, they would be forced to add more, thus putting them back in the exact scenario they were trying to avoid in the first place: multiple islands of storage.
Limited open storage support:
Although the NAS appliance vendor offered a "gateway" version, the IT managers realized this product had the same scalability and cost issues as the vendor's conventional NAS offerings.
Furthermore, their open storage support came at a high price: 30% of the available capacity would be lost to the vendor's file system overhead.
ONStor NAS gateway provides a better option:
ONStor NAS Gateways provided the perfect solution for this hospital. ONStor addressed these issues, and met the primary objective of delivering a highly available, highly scalable solution. Four elements made the ONStor solution a good fit for their environment:
Scalability:
With their initial implementation at 20TB, scalability was critical to this hospital. The ONStor environment scales to 40 petabytes within a single storage pool, permanently freeing them from the management issues inherent in multiple storage silos.
Availability:
In the healthcare environment, data availability directly impacts the quality of patient care. ONStor's n-way clustering architecture provides multiple levels of redundancy to ensure that data is always available.
Open Storage:
One objective of the hospital's IT managers was to leverage their existing storage hardware and software. ONStor gave them that flexibility with the industry's widest interoperability matrix.
Cost:
ONStor offered an acquisition cost 65% lower than the competing NAS appliance vendors.
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