Press Release
February 23, 2004
Hopkinton, - February 23, 2004 -
OSF Healthcare System, an integrated network of seven healthcare facilities in Illinois and Michigan, is implementing EMC Corporation's full range of networked storage and open software to roll out information lifecycle management (ILM), a strategy that assigns storage tiers offering varying levels of availability, performance and cost to information assets whose value changes over time. By implementing an EMC-based ILM strategy, OSF Healthcare System will meet its rapidly growing data storage and compliance needs while dramatically cutting storage costs and improving information availability to speed decision-making about patient care.
Mike Nauman, OSF Healthcare System's Chief Information Officer, said, "Our storage needs are growing by 50% annually because of our exploding volume of medical testing. It was clear that we needed a very different storage strategy if we were going to provide the same level of data access and availability - and stay on budget. With EMC's ILM, we can classify and prioritize our data based on its time-critical demand, then store it according to different requirements for accessibility, response time and expense. Also, ILM will allow us to speed the delivery of critical information to our medical staff and patients to improve clinical work flow productivity, while significantly lowering our data management costs."
Jim Doedtman, OSF Healthcare System's Technical Planning Manager, said, "Distributing our data across multiple storage levels will give us tremendous cost savings. For instance, we will be able to move sleep-study image data from Symmetrix® to Centera™ for longer-term archiving, helping us comply with HIPAA requirements. ILM also will help us address our Microsoft Exchange e-mail environment, which is growing exponentially. By moving 70 percent of our e-mail files to Centera, we will be able to meet our service level requirements for backup and restore, which we can't do now due to the sheer size of the environment. Additionally, being able to dramatically decrease the size of these data stores will boost our system performance."
OSF Healthcare System's 80-terabyte EMC infrastructure will span multiple storage tiers based on business processes and the application requirements:
Providing more insight into how OSF Healthcare System defines its varying tiers, Doedtman stated, "Systems that are not considered 'critical' but require the performance of CLARiiON are targeted for our mid-tier. The cost difference between Symmetrix and CLARiiON Fibre Channel capacity is significant enough to structure CLARiiON SAN as a separate tier of storage. Also at our mid-tier, performance of the CLARiiON with ATA storage for both SAN and NAS has been very impressive. With our classification efforts, we are discovering more systems and information that can be moved to ATA disk technology. As a result, our CLARiiON with ATA and Centera tiers will experience the most significant growth."
As part of its ILM strategy, OSF Healthcare System is upgrading to the latest version of EMC's ControlCenter™ storage management software. Doedtman said, "ControlCenter will give us an important trending capability we haven't had before. It will give us much better information on the current state of our Symmetrix and CLARiiON storage, with the ability to run reports for further manipulation and analysis. We also will utilize it to issue alerts when we approach threshold levels across the infrastructure and require more storage capacity. The increase in our storage management efficiency - to say nothing of having better, more complete information - will be dramatic. In fact, ControlCenter will help us handle our exponential storage growth with little, if any, increase in our storage management staff."
OSF Healthcare System, based in Peoria, Ill., is utilizing ControlCenter to manage EMC storage for applications running in its HP UX, IBM AIX, Linux, Windows 2000 and 2003 Server operating environments, as well as its IBM mainframe environment. OSF Healthcare System utilizes other EMC software, including TimeFinder™, PowerPath®, Replication Manager and Navisphere®, to streamline storage management and increase data availability.
EMC Professional Services is assisting OSF Healthcare System with the design and implementation of its EMC ILM infrastructure.
About EMC
EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) is the world leader in products, services and solutions for information storage and management that help organizations extract the maximum value from their information, at the lowest total cost, across every point in the information lifecycle. Information about EMC's products and services can be found at www.EMC.com., a part of , enables organizations to modernize, automate and transform their using industry-leading , servers, and data protection technologies. This provides a trusted foundation for businesses to transform IT, through the creation of a , and transform their business through the creation of cloud-native applications and solutions. Dell EMC services customers across 180 countries – including 98 percent of the Fortune 500 – with the industry’s most comprehensive and innovative portfolio from edge to core to cloud.