Penn State Hershey Medical Center thrives on IBM Storage

Founded in 1967, Penn State Hershey Medical Center and Penn State College of Medicine is a leading U.S. academic health center, with some 9,000 employees, a world-class medical resident training program and a network of outpatient sites and affiliate and partner hospitals in a region that is home to more than four million Pennsylvanians. Penn State Hershey activities span three focus areas: a medical school, hospital and outpatient services, and medical research.

Penn State Hershey’s research and patient care rely on a huge volume of data, ranging from files generated by its imaging modality systems to patient records. With a philosophy of 'all data is critical', the medical center tried to protect its data with real-time asynchronous mirroring to its hot disaster recovery (DR) site—but incurred a huge impact on application performance to end users.

“Initially, we felt that Fibre Channel (FC) storage would be required to achieve the optimal performance for our IT investment,” says Bruce Cash, IT Manager at the Department of IT, Penn State Hershey. “After we saw what IBM was capable of delivering, we made the decision to change from our legacy storage solution to the XIV Storage System, which delivered the performance and availability to make our disaster recovery program feasible almost overnight.”

Penn State Hershey deployed two IBM XIV Storage Systems in its primary data center and an additional two in its secondary data center 100 miles away. The company migrated 150 TB (approximately 60 percent of its data) to XIV in a mere three weeks, during short downtime windows.

All data is crucial
Penn State Hershey chose XIV after participating in a hands-on trial of the technology at IBM offices in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

“IBM did more than answer our questions about redundancy and performance—they actually showed us how the system works,” says Mettley. “If we hadn’t physically pulled out XIV drives from the system while it was still running and seen first-hand that zero data loss resulted, I don’t think I’d have fully appreciated the resilience and stability of the platform.”

“We decided that XIV was a good fit for us both for its performance and resiliency, as well as its competitive pricing and tierless architecture,” says Yotin Chennavasin, Team Leader for UNIX SAN Storage at the Department of IT, Penn State Hershey. “In a hospital environment, there’s an idea that all data is crucial. Because of that, we effectively had no storage tiers to begin with, so the fact that XIV is tier-free made the transition quite natural.

“In terms of cost, XIV was extremely competitive—it offered the best price-performance ratio of all the solutions we considered.”

Growing by 100 TB a year
“One of our primary concerns with the old environment was system performance,” comments Cash. “As a hospital, we have an obligation to store current and archived patient records, both medical and financial, as well as data from ongoing research. These records are crucial, so we replicate the data to our DR hot site, located 100 miles away, accessible via a 1 GB dedicated link.”

“The breaking point came when data replication to the hot site started to affect our online users,” explains Sherry Mettley, IT Manager at the Department of IT, Penn State Hershey “Our data is growing by around 100 TB per year, which meant even more traffic between Penn State Hershey and the DR site. Although the system never crashed outright, it sometimes slowed our production times, particular with our medical record management software, to a crawl.” IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) virtualizes the capacity of the two production XIV systems to create a single pool of storage. SVC also replicates the most critical data asynchronously using IBM Global Mirror technology to the pooled XIV systems in the secondary data center, giving Penn State Hershey the ability to fail over in the event of a disaster. The data replication has no impact on the performance of production systems.

Combined with SAN Volume Controller virtualization and cross-site data replication, XIV provides a flexible, high-performance platform at Penn State Hershey for storing business-critical medical and financial data. In addition to the business continuity option provided by IBM Global Mirror replication for its most critical data, Penn State Hershey uses IBM Tivoli® Storage Manager to back up all 200 GB of production data to an IBM System Storage TS7650G ProtecTIER Deduplication Gateway in its primary data center. The data is then replicated asynchronously to a second ProtecTIER system in the secondary data center, and is also written to tape in both locations. Thanks to a four-to-one compression ratio, HMC requires just 50 TB of capacity in each ProtecTIER system. Using Tivoli Storage Manager, the organization can easily restore anything from entire systems down to individual files.

High performance for near half the cost
With high-performance storage on XIV, the production environment at Penn State Hershey can now generate Eclipsys reports much faster, and the organization has reduced its cost per gigabyte by 44 percent. “As soon as XIV went live, we got immediate feedback from our Eclipsys system analysts and data warehouse staff,” says Cash. “Because XIV is massively parallelized, we have much faster data access. We started with four XIV frames and have added two additional frames each year for the last two years.” He adds, “In the past, we ran DR scenarios every six months—it took several hours to recover the system. With XIV and SVC, we are not only hitting our Recovery Time Objective but have also, due to the reduced cost and complexity of our DR process, been able to increase testing to once every quarter, dramatically improving data security.”

Mettley comments: “Now, when we need to provide a new application, we can see exactly what space is available, and rapidly provision the necessary storage capacity to respond to that need. It’s also easy to add new disk drives, and the performance actually increases—if we had tried to do that with our old system, it would have created I/O performance bottlenecks.”

However, the most impressive benefit of XIV was its reliability. “XIV is easy to manage, cost-effective and, above all, can handle component failure. We could lose 14 drives concurrently and it’d still be running,” Mettley says.

Penn State Hershey is confident it selected the best solution for its vital medical and business data. “The solution has delivered even more than we’d hoped for,” concludes Mettley. “With XIV, we’ve gained the confidence that we’ll be able to continue to improve on the high-quality service that our researchers, students and patients have come to expect.”