Top 5 Storage Solutions for Healthcare

DCIG, LLC announced the 2022-23 TOP 5 Storage Solutions for Healthcare report.

It evaluated 16 providers offering storage solutions across six different categories. This report provides guidance on the TOP 5 vendors providing storage solutions that organizations should consider.
 
DCIG’s TOP 5 reports help IT decision makers:
• Discover, research, and analyze products for consideration
• Understand essential factors enterprises should consider for selecting a storage solution
• Identify differentiators between top storage solutions that may be important to their business

Healthcare storage is challenging
Healthcare IT must tackle more challenging data handling requirements than most enterprises. In this environment, storage is perhaps the most difficult architectural component to structure and operate both effectively for the mission and correctly for security. Not only are ultra-HA, remote collaboration and fast data access critical to treating patients and achieving good patient outcomes, but also data protection needs to be paramount.

Both compliance and data privacy regulations ensure that healthcare IT has a lot of demanding work cut out for them in managing data access, integrity/retention and DR. Healthcare is lagging behind many industries in IT modernization efforts. 
Specific healthcare workloads requiring aligned modern storage can include PACs/VNA (medical imaging and image archives), telemedicine/telehealth distance sharing and collaboration (VDI etc.), EMR/EHR (patient records) and big data powered research analytics. These applications require local performant access to large media files (both images and video streams), secure sharing and collaboration across distances, and large on-line archives.

Large image data needs to be available on-demand, the image application needs fast streaming quality access, and online sharing needs to be supported and secured-all can be challenges for healthcare IT stuck with weak storage solutions. Patient health records may be hard to access even internally (much less transferred to the point of patient care) due to overburdened or legacy storage systems that are still in use because of the fear of failing to meet legal compliance or security concerns (i.e. protecting data in a cloud or cloud-like distributed system).

Benefits of Effective Storage for Healthcare Solution
The modern storage solutions evaluated in this report all have features that address IT modernization challenges and concerns. From a healthcare business perspective, they support and enable many of the desired healthcare IT initiatives mentioned above.
For example, these storage solutions can be used to modernize and consolidate unstructured file storage that is often found locked inside aging NAS arrays local to each hospital data center.

By aggregating local data into a global, distributed file system, data management policies can be applied immediately and universally while ensuring wide secure access for collaboration and sharing. Many of the solutions address performance with “edge” devices that can provide flash-speed streaming media access to local applications.

DCIG consulting analyst, Mike Matchett, states: “It’s hard to imagine truly proving compliance and really  protecting critical data without the support of a modern healthcare storage solution.”

Distinguishing Features of Storage of Healthcare Solutions
In addition to the broad feature sets mentioned above, all of the storage solutions evaluated in this report have a few things in common that distinguish them for the Healthcare use case from the wider market of IT storage solutions:
• Scalable capacity. They scale capacity to many petabytes cost-effectively, enabling global NAS consolidation and the creation of a single file system architecture.
• Performance at scale. They deliver low latency and high throughput streams to support the most demanding data-intensive applications even as they scale.
• Interoperability and access. They provide multiprotocol support and a wide range of connectivity to meet a variety of workload requirements while delivering IO to a large set of simultaneous, distributed users.
• Architectural flexibility. They generally can adopt or include a variety of underlying storage media, storage server node types and cloud extensions as storage tiering needs grow and expand with a proven track record of refresh and updating to new technologies.
• Enterprise management. They offer solid, mature management approaches and policy-based management for data protection, security, replication/synchronizatioStorage Solutions for Healthcare

This report evaluated 18 vendors that offer storage solutions for healthcare. The general categories under which DCIG evaluated solution features included:
• Deployment capabilities
• Data protection capabilities
• Product and performance management
• Documentation support
• Technical support
• Licensing and pricing

Based on these criteria, the analyst firm awarded the following storage products a TOP 5 ranking (in alphabetical order):
• Dell Powerscale
• IBM Spectrum Scale
• Nasuni
• Pavilion HyperParallelt Data Platform
• Quantum StorNext

Solutions evaluated:
• DDN EXAScaler
• Dell PowerScale F900
• Hitachi Vantara HCP
• HPE ClusterStor E1000
• Huawei OceanStor 9000
• IBM Spectrum Scale
• Nasuni
• Netapp HPSS (E-series)
• Panasas ActiveStor Ultra
• Pavilion HyperParallel Data Platform
• Pure Storage FlashBlade
• Quantum StorNext
• Qumulo File Data Platform
• Quobyte
• Vast Data Universal Storage
• Weka WekaFS

“Healthcare organizations need to provide easy, fast access to files to their clinicians and staff, and they also need strong protection vs. ransomware and other threats,” said David Grant, chief commercial officer, Nasuni Corp. “DCIG’s naming Nasuni as a TOP 5 storage solution for healthcare is a validation of the value we’re providing to hospitals and medical practices around the world, cutting file infrastructure costs while providing the scalability, protection and simplified, centralized management that healthcare IT requires.”

“Modern healthcare organizations are adopting key initiatives designed to truly transform patient care and improve patient outcomes, but legacy IT file storage can hold them back. While researching the DCIG TOP 5 Storage solutions for healthcare, we found that the right distributed, scalable, and efficient file storage solution can not only enable these new initiatives, but can vastly improve existing medical image and record applications, ensure patient data protection and regulatory compliance, provide security from attacks like ransomware, and ultimately accelerate both healthcare and healthcare business innovation“, said Matchett.

“DCIG is pleased to recognize these TOP 5 solutions to the challenging data handling requirements of the healthcare industry. This short list includes solutions from established enterprise storage vendors and relative newcomers offering the scalability and flexibility required to meet these requirements,” said Ken Clipperton, DCIG lead analyst, storage.