Daughters of Charity Health System Consolidated Storage and Servers With EMC

EMC Corporation announced that the Daughters of Charity Health System (DCHS), a regional system of six hospitals spanning the California coast, has consolidated storage and servers and implemented business continuity functions to deliver new online clinical systems, better protect data, maximize energy efficiency in the datacenter and reduce IT administration costs.

Michael Day, Director of Information Technology, DCHS, said, "Quality and compassionate patient care is embedded in everything we do here. Toward that end, we’ve automated several new clinical functions, such as making radiology images available electronically to physicians, nurses and other healthcare providers. Because these new initiatives have required substantially more storage, we’ve created a more dynamic, flexible environment to manage rapid growth of our information infrastructure. And because 24/7 is the standard in a clinical setting, we’ve embraced new business continuity strategies to ensure patient care interruptions are minimized."

DCHS hospitals and clinics in California access data for centralized clinical applications, such as the Quadramed Computerized Patient Record, Misys Electronic Health Record and McKesson Picture Archiving Communications Systems (PACS), which are stored on EMC CLARiiON networked storage systems. The CLARiiON systems are installed in two Texas datacenters operated by Perot Systems, a worldwide IT solutions provider that manages IT operations for DCHS. In addition, the CLARiiON systems have been implemented at each of DCHS’s major hospitals to manage local applications, such as Microsoft Exchange for email and Microsoft SQL Server database software, as well as clinical solutions.

"We’ve centralized much of our individual server storage onto EMC storage area networks (SANs), so we can easily expand with more disk space as we need it," continued Day. "Our retrieval times for critical medical information are faster, which facilitates clinicians making more responsive and educated decisions. Our infrastructure is easier to manage and protect because we can view all of our SANs from a single screen as opposed to jumping from server to server. We use EMC software to automate a range of storage administration, replication and backup and recovery functions, helping DCHS to become more efficient. Even though our storage has increased from 45 to 150 terabytes in just two years, we still have the equivalent of one full-time employee managing it all."

To further consolidate and protect its infrastructure, DCHS has deployed VMware ESX Server virtualization software so that individual physical servers are able to run multiple ‘virtual machines.’ DCHS has been able to avoid purchasing 30 physical servers for new projects by recycling existing servers. DCHS also believes it will save over 500,000 kilowatt hours per year. In 2009, DCHS expects to consolidate from 187 physical servers to 19 VMware ESX servers. If a virtual machine needs more resources than is being provided, DCHS uses VMware’s VMotion to move the virtual machine from one physical server to other – online, and without service interruption. In addition, if a physical server fails, VMware HA automatically fails over virtual machines to operational servers. VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB), which is integrated with its EMC NetWorker solution, is used to centralize backup of virtual machines.

"Fewer servers to manage in a virtualized environment have contributed to a more resilient infrastructure," said Day. "With VMware and EMC, we’re able to automatically back up all of our virtual machines. We also can move virtual machines from one server to another if we need to run firmware updates or if a server unexpectedly goes down. VMware and EMC are integral components of our business continuity strategy."

To ensure uninterrupted access to critical medical data, Perot uses EMC MirrorView software to replicate DCHS’s Quadramed CPR application stored on a CLARiiON system to another CLARiiON system at a separate datacenter. Perot also archives DCHS’s older radiology and cardiology images and data to an EMC Centera content-addressed storage system, which is replicated to another Centera system. DCHS hospitals and datacenters also use EMC EmailXtender to archive older emails from a CLARiiON system to a Centera system.

"Because we care for patients around the clock, we protect our data in many ways," said Day. "If our patient records application was knocked offline, we’d fail over to our remote site within seconds. By archiving to EMC Centera, we retrieve older records in less than a minute compared to 30 minutes for tape. Offloading ‘heavy’ files, like CT scans, from the SAN to Centera also shrinks the amount of data we need to back up, which contributes to faster backups and restores."

Based in Los Altos Hills, Calif., DCHS has replaced its Veritas Backup Exec tape solution with EMC NetWorker, which enables the hospitals and datacenters to back up data initially to CLARiiON and move it over to tape for long-term storage.

Chris Dunning, the Senior Network Engineer from Perot working with DCHS, said: "We centrally monitor how our backups are running at the hospitals. If we discover a backup wasn’t complete, we’re able to get it back on track quickly. Back up to disk is also faster. Before, a backup would barely complete before the next one was due to kick off. Now, we have more breathing room to test restores and validate our process is really working."