Wellmont Health System

Transcription

1 Customer Profile Wellmont Health System EMC tiered-storage, disaster recovery, and server virtualization solutions support healthcare system s growing information management requirements Wellmont Health System is the premier provider of healthcare services for Northeast Tennessee, Southwest Virginia, and Southeast Kentucky. It encompasses a network of 13 owned and affiliated hospitals dedicated to delivering top-quality, comprehensive healthcare and wellness services across the Tri-State region. With a national reputation for safety, Wellmont Health System relies on an advanced IT infrastructure designed to facilitate 24x7 access to patient information throughout its network to support the highest quality of care possible. The organization s dynamic IT infrastructure spans three data centers linked together across an enterprise network via Course Wavelength Division Multiplexing (CDWM) technology over dark fiber. This facilitates connectivity to a four Gigabit Ethernet backbone and an eight Gigabit Fibre Channel network. Multiple tiers of EMC storage, representing over 500 terabytes of capacity, reside within Wellmont Health System s three data centers. This tiered storage approach enables the organization s IT team to provision the right kind of storage to accommodate different application service-level needs for the highest efficiency possible all while ensuring non-stop access to information by those entrusted with patient care. A pair of EMC Connectrix (Cisco MDS 9000 family) directors at both the Kingsport corporate data center (CORP) and the Bristol Regional Medical Center data center (BRMC), along with two EMC Connectrix switches at the Holston Valley Medical Center (HVMC) form a high-performance, highly reliable eight Gigabit ring of connectivity between the sites. EMC is our single source for integrated, SAN, NAS, archiving, and disaster recovery solutions, says Rex Lewis, senior SAN/UNIX engineer. We partnered with EMC to initiate best practices supported by industry-leading storage solutions to successfully and costeffectively meet our diverse healthcare information management requirements. High performance and availability for mission-critical applications Six years ago, the organization switched from a direct-attached storage environment to a centralized EMC Symmetrix storage infrastructure. Today, two new mirrored EMC Symmetrix DMX systems successfully support the organization s most-critical applications, providing unsurpassed access speeds and continuous availability. Applications

2 requiring these stringent service levels include the organization s McKesson family of health information systems, a Microsoft Server environment, Misys applications, and an Agfa PACS. The organization s VMware environment, including the virtual operating systems and storage necessary to run applications supported by these virtual servers, is also accommodated by Symmetrix DMX storage. Advanced EMC ControlCenter software tools, such as Symmetrix Optimizer and Performance Manager are used to streamline storage management tasks. Symmetrix Optimizer is run on a regular basis to provide the information necessary to adjust the environment to support the most effective utilization of storage resources. We let Symmetrix Optimizer show us where the hot spots are on the physical disks, and then pick from the recommendations on what we d like to move, explains Lewis. The nice thing is that it lets us move things around to better accommodate capacity requirements without impacting users. The servers and applications stay up and running throughout the process. EMC is our single source for integrated, SAN, NAS, archiving, and disaster recovery solutions. We partnered with EMC to initiate best practices supported by industryleading storage solutions to successfully and cost-effectively meet our diverse healthcare information management requirements. Rex Lewis, Senior SAN/UNIX Engineer EMC Performance Manager is used to monitor utilization rates over time. The generation of monthly storage metrics reports allows the organization to proactively plan for the resources necessary to address future needs. A key benefit of this software is that it provides us with enough information to do planned hardware upgrades, says Lewis. Supplying an industry-leading disaster recovery solution for this patient-critical infrastructure, EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF ) software also helps meet business continuity requirements for internal and external regulations. EMC SRDF automatically mirrors data from the EMC Symmetrix DMX system located within the CORP data center to the other Symmetrix DMX system housed within the BRMC data center 38 miles away. SRDF is the lynchpin of our disaster recovery plan and allows for real-time data replication, states Darren Ramsey, director of Technical Services. In the event of a disaster at the primary data center we can recover patient-critical systems and in less than one hour. Further boosting performance and reliability, EMC PowerPath management software provides advanced multi-pathing, load-balancing, and failover capabilities between servers and Symmetrix storage throughout Wellmont Health System s IT environment. Expansion made easy Recently, the high capacity and inherent flexibility of the organization s EMC Symmetrix DMX platform played an important role in facilitating a necessary upgrade to its McKesson family of health information systems. Engaged to do the migration, McKesson s Technology Service Group (TSG) estimated the process would require 20 hours of downtime to back up the data, bring the system down, migrate the data, and bring the system up again. However, through Wellmont Health System s pay-as-you-grow lease with EMC,

3 the organization s IT team was able to offer an alternative migration plan that would require less than two-and-a-half hours of downtime. By providing the McKesson migration team with LUNs on the Symmetrix and connecting another server to those LUNs, data could easily be migrated to the new LUNs. Then, during the period when the servers were brought down, the LUNs and servers could be quickly swapped. This approach resulted in a swift and successful migration, and now allows for better support of a rapidly growing database. The EMC leasing program allowed us to start with a capacity base on the DMX and pay as we grow into the buffer area, explains Lewis. This gives us the flexibility to expand as we need it rather than budget for it all up front which can sometimes be difficult. As a result, we were able to immediately tap into that additional storage capacity to accommodate the McKesson upgrade and to make it happen in just a few hours. NAS and SAN support in one system Two EMC Celerra NS704 Series Gateway IP storage systems with dual data movers and EMC CLARiiON storage on the back end now enable Wellmont Health System to consolidate both block and file tier-two and tier-three storage assets onto a single, highly reliable, and scalable modular storage array. These cutting-edge systems reside within both CORP and BRMC data centers. The NAS file server component of the solution supports all of the organization s home directories for its 6,000 users, which are stored on the CLARiiON arrays. Set up in primary/ standby mode, dual data movers in each NS704 Series Gateway system ensure failover capability for high availability at each site. EMC Celerra Replicator software is used to support IP replication between the sites. EMC CLARiiON CX storage at the BRMC site provides a cost-effective, yet highly reliable short-term cache repository for Wellmont Health System s Agfa PACS Fast Cache, which houses a year s worth of studies on ATA drives. This system safeguards PACS images generated from across the enterprise while accommodating the immediate information access needs of the organization s radiologists. Additionally, the CLARiiON CX storage at both BRMC and CORP sites is leveraged to provide backup pools to store local backups for each site. Backup is facilitated by IBM Tivoli Storage Manager software. This process gives us a much faster way of storing backups instead of going directly to slow tape, states Lewis. We send them to a temporary disk pool on the CLARiiON and then at some point the Tivoli Storage Manager software goes in and migrates that data off to tape. Plans to replace the organization s existing overflowing tape library with a more costefficient virtual tape library solution are underway. EMC Disk Library systems have been acquired for both HVMC and BRMC data centers to support rapid backups facilitated by IBM Tivoli Storage Manager software. EMC Disk Library technology has enabled Wellmont Health System to avoid the purchase of six new LT03 tape drives, two additional Tivoli Storage Manager servers, and 200 additional tapes for a total cost of $250,000. Instead, those funds have been invested toward the purchase of EMC Disk Library systems which will provide a cost-efficient, long-term solution designed to improve backup service-level objectives and business restore capabilities, as well as position the organization for complete tape elimination. Our plan is to initially have 75 terabytes of data on each library, says Lewis. Eventually we hope to replicate the data between the two systems which will enable us to eliminate

4 tape backups altogether. It will also eliminate the need to use our CLARiiON resources for backup which will help conserve our tier-two resources and extend our investment there. We expect the solution to provide a cost-effective approach to storing our growing data. An advanced solution for online archives Providing cost-efficient, bi-directionally replicated online archive repositories, EMC Centera systems at HVMC and BRMC facilities deliver rapid access, content authenticity, and petabyte scalability to fully accommodate the organization s growing demand for archival storage for key applications including those from Agfa, docstar, Eleckta, Emageon, GE Healthcare, McKesson, Microsoft Exchange, and Philips. An EMC Centera Universal Access (CUA) software appliance enables the organization s non-integrated Windows and UNIX enterprise applications to store and retrieve content from EMC Centera using CIFS and NFS protocols. A second standby CUA brings enhanced availability to the environment by facilitating the transition of the standby CUA to an active state if the active CUA fails. SRDF is the lynchpin of our disaster recovery plan and allows for realtime data replication. In the event of a disaster at the primary data center we can recover patient-critical systems and in less than one hour. Darren Ramsey, Director of Technical Services Facilitating automatic records backup, new Agfa PACS images are committed to CLARiiON and EMC Centera at the same time. Historical images previously stored on optical disks have been transferred directly to the EMC Centera system which now provides a safe and economical online archive repository for past and present images. In the old environment, retrieving historical studies took considerable time and effort. If a radiologist needed to compare a current image with one taken several years ago, a call had to be made to an operator who would have to search through shelves of optical disks in the computer room to find the right one and mount it in the jukebox to provide access. By having the data stored on the EMC Centera, radiologists can now access historical studies within seconds with no operator involved, says Lewis. Through the use of EMC DiskXtender, which supports automated file system archiving, and EMC Xtender software, which provides management capabilities, all Microsoft Exchange messages are archived to EMC Centera as they are processed by the system. Xtender stores single copies of messages and attachments and uses compression for maximum storage efficiency. attachments over thirty days old are removed from the Exchange store and replaced with shortcuts, thereby reducing demands on the server. With the use of an Outlook plug-in, archived messages that have been deleted from the Exchange store can be retrieved by users themselves with no IT intervention. Xtender has saved us a lot of time and money, says Lewis. Without it we would have had to add more tier-one storage and/or go to tape which requires a more costly and time-consuming process to create and store the tapes or recover messages and attachments from them.

5 EMC DiskXtender is also used to move McKesson records older than 60 days from the Symmetrix DMX system to EMC Centera. In addition, EMC DiskXtender, UNIX/Linux, Data Manager for Celerra will soon be deployed to reduce the amount of CLARiiON storage required for the organization s home directories. DiskXtender will be used to automatically move data that hasn t been accessed for six months or longer, as defined by retention policies, out to EMC Centera archives. Of added benefit with regard to effective management of this archival environment, EMC Centera Seek and EMC Centera Chargeback Reporter software solutions generate monthly reports on EMC Centera resource consumption rates. Although we don t use these tools for chargeback, we do let people know how much EMC Centera storage they are consuming, says Lewis. The software helps us project when we will need to buy more storage. A virtual server environment further improves operational efficiencies Prior to Wellmont Health System s adoption of VMware server virtualization technology, the organization had approximately 250 physical servers in operation supporting its clinical and business applications. Faced with rapidly diminishing floor space and power resources, the organization turned again to EMC solutions. Facilitating substantial consolidation, 12 VMware ESX servers are now in place running virtual machines for 130 different applications which previously ran on their own separate physical servers. VMware has enabled us to operate much more efficiently, says John Wininger, Systems Engineer II. It has also given us the flexibility to quickly provision new servers as needed and make resource adjustments as demands grow. VMware VMotion software, which allows for the non-disruptive movement of virtual machines from one physical server to another, has given Wellmont Health System s technical staff a powerful tool for optimizing the use of server resources and enhancing availability. This capability was put to the test last year when the organization migrated off its old Symmetrix to the new Symmetrix DMX platform. We actually used a new feature in VMware Infrastructure 3, explains Wininger. Normally with VMotion you just move memory content, not actual disk data. With the latest VMotion capabilities we were also able to move the disk content without taking the server offline which enabled us to migrate around 100 servers to the new SAN without any downtime. VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and High-Availability (HA) solutions are now being leveraged by the organization as well. With these new solutions, monitoring and adjusting utilization across resource pools and restarting virtual machines in the event of physical server failure becomes automatic. VMware technology coupled with EMC SRDF mirroring software has also facilitated more comprehensive disaster recovery and business continuity capabilities. We can now have a physical machine, like an Exchange Server, running at one site and by using SRDF mirroring capabilities we can actually bring that server up on a virtual machine on standby at another site, states Wininger.

6 Another benefit VMware has delivered is simplified lab testing and development. Instead of having three or four physical boxes, I can set up a number of virtual machines on one physical server in a matter of minutes, says Wininger. VMware has enabled us to easily do application modeling and load baselining, and has allowed us to emulate entire Active Directory, Exchange, and other Microsoft environments on a single machine. An IT environment that supports exceptional patient care Wellmont Health System s integrated, tiered EMC information infrastructure and VMware server virtualization capabilities have enhanced the organization s ability to run IT operations as efficiently as possible, while strengthening the facility s ability to deliver the safest, most expedient, highest quality healthcare services to the many communities it serves. EMC s broad range of solutions have provided us with a comprehensive, tiered approach to intelligently address our information management challenges, says Ramsey. We can now seamlessly increase our storage resources which is very important given the exponential growth of our electronic medical records. EMC s product reliability and SRDF technology have helped us achieve five-nines availability which is vital within the healthcare industry. In addition, VMware technology has given us the means to cost-effectively grow our virtual server farms to quickly accommodate new applications while enabling us to conserve data center space and reduce power and cooling demands. EMC Corporation Hopkinton Massachusetts In North America EMC 2, EMC, EMC Centera, EMC ControlCenter, Celerra, Centera, CLARiiON, Connectrix, DiskXtender, Xtender, PowerPath, SRDF, Symmetrix, and where information lives are registered trademarks and Celerra Replicator, and Symmetrix DMX are trademarks of EMC Corporation. VMware and VMotion are registered trademarks of VMware, Inc. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners. Copyright 2007 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Published in the USA. 11/07 Customer Profile H4080