Extreme storage: a single "super server" consolidates business files once housed on more than 100 smaller machines - What works: data storage

Health Management Technology, Sept, 2002

Every day, every healthcare organization generates mountains of data ranging from radiologic images to claim transactions. When there are too many computer files stored on too many peripheral storage devices, a switch to network attached storage (NAS) can simplify data management--and prevent administrative overhead from busting the budget.

PROBLEM

Kindred Healthcare is a provider of long-term healthcare services that operates hospitals and nursing centers in 43 states. With 53 long-term acute care hospitals, 312 skilled nursing centers and a variety of other facilities, we are constantly producing reams of records that have to be stored, backed up and managed for easy access.

At one point, the technical staff at our central data processing center in Louisville was juggling more than 700 data storage devices that were attached to an equal number of computers serving applications to employees throughout our organization. Managing 700 islands of storage required a tremendous amount of manpower, and the inability to centrally manage 700 discrete devices made it difficult to protect ourselves against the failure of an individual server.

As long as we were using this direct attached storage, we knew we could not sustain ongoing growth without continuing to increase the size of our technical support staff. We needed a more economical means of growing the organization, so we began looking for alternative storage solutions that would require less administrative effort.

Two years ago, we solved part of the problem by moving to a storage area network (SAN) for our database applications, including our SAP R/3 general ledger, financial reporting and payroll systems as well as our data warehouse. This allowed us to centralize most of our disk drives in one location for easier administration.

But SANs are not engineered for serving files, and we still had more than 100 separate storage devices dedicated to housing files ranging from pharmacy and dietary records to physician reference systems and time and attendance records. We needed a more efficient storage method that would make it possible to reduce the number of storage devices we were managing for file serving applications.

SOLUTION

After consulting with technology experts like Gartner, we settled on network attached storage (NAS), a different storage architecture specifically designed to consolidate files from throughout a computer network on a single machine.

A single NAS storage appliance could hold all the data on the 100 peripheral devices we were using to store files, give us plenty of room to grow without adding another machine, and make it possible to back up one server instead of 100. It would also speed file delivery because--unlike the general purpose file servers we were using--it does not perform other tasks such as application serving that compete for processor resources.

One of our executives was familiar with Auspex Systems, the company that invented network attached storage in the late 1980s. We approached Auspex and learned that they were in the final stages of adding a new model to their NS3000 family of NAS servers that we believed would meet all of our requirements.

The existing NS3000 servers already would operate in our Windows NT environment as well as on the UNIX platform. But they didn't have the redundancy and connectivity features we needed.

The new Auspex NS3000XA ("Xtreme Availability") system then being developed would give us two identical machines that maintained two copies of all files and would allow one machine to automatically assume the functions of the other in the event of a system or component failure, thanks to special software permitting the two boxes to talk to each other. This would enable us to avoid the risk that a single failing component might leave our 650 corporate employees without access to information they needed.

The Auspex XA also would connect to the fiber channel network we had installed when we deployed our SAN. This was a major benefit because it would allow us to manage both storage systems with one team and one set of operational support tools including Tivoli Storage Manager, which we already owned.

Therefore, all of our storage could be monitored from one console rather than several; backup and disaster recovery operations could be controlled with the same software; and all storage traffic could run over the fiber channel network instead of the TCP/IP network used by the NAS, thereby avoiding impact on end users.

The XA system was just entering beta testing when we hooked up with the vendor, so we agreed to participate in the pilot. Auspex installed the beta version in our Louisville data processing center in May 2001, and we went live in January 2002 after eight months of helping Auspex get the system ready for prime time.

IMPLEMENTATION AND TRAINING

Installation was a simple matter of connecting the two XA machines to our local area network, then connecting the system to our SAN through two gigabit Ethernet cards and a single fiber channel connection. Three members of our storage management team were trained on site as part of the beta program, so the transition from pilot to production was seamless.