Desperately seeking storage: Seattle hospital abandons individual server-based storage and backup and adopts an NAS enterprise solution - What works: data storage

Health Management Technology, Sept, 2003

Backup and recovery in a patient care facility is exceptionally critical, since lost data can delay medical decisions and ultimately result in a loss of life. This serious responsibility prompted Seattle's Northwest Hospital & Medical Center to give its aging storage system some intensive care.

PROBLEM

Northwest Hospital & Medical Center is a 345-bed community hospital with a staff of more than 1,600 employees and a reputation as a top patient care facility. As a hospital, we are recognized as a national leader in the fields of brain, breast and prostate cancers, neurological disorders and cardiology. We are also known for the introduction of Gamma Knife radiosurgery to the Pacific Northwest in 1993 and for our state-of-the-art rehabilitation therapy treatment. As we continued to integrate cutting-edge medical technologies, however, it became clear that our storage infrastructure could no longer keep pace.

Managing our storage system was becoming very cumbersome, and expansion was difficult. The main difficulty was our direct-attached storage environment, which forced the IT department to physically move backup tapes from server to server.

Needless to say, this was anything but effective. If the IT department was late switching the tape, the backup process would encounter errors. If the IT department was early, it had to wait to change the tape. It was a never-ending cycle of inefficiency. We also experienced problems managing our CD-based information. The CD media was hard to work with, difficult to track and time-consuming to move in and out of the tower.

Because the old storage system wasn't cutting it, we started to evaluate our options. The original plan simply called for adding another DLTtape library, but we later decided that adding more drives was just a Band-Aid, and what we needed was a cure.

We took another look at the problems we were encountering and identified three objectives:

* We needed to shrink our backup window. The old DLTtape drives were extremely slow, so we didn't have enough time to do complete nightly backups.

* We needed more storage capacity. Simply adding more drives wasn't the answer.

* We needed to reduce downtime caused by human error. We were encountering too many problems caused by manually changing tapes in the direct-attached environment.

SOLUTION

In March 2002, we replaced our old CD tower and DLT drives with two Sony FSV-M1 NAS devices with 480 GB of storage capacity each. Sony's NAS is a self-contained storage server that comes equipped with its own circuit boards, embedded software and power supplies. It is optimized to perform a single function: high performance file access and storage across the network. In our Windows environment, startup was almost automatic after initializing (i.e., allowing time for the embedded software to detect and configure to the existing network). The NAS was up and online within 30 minutes.

The implementation consolidated our numerous CDs onto one easy-to-maintain-and-administer storage server that quickly serves up data in response to user inquiries. One NAS device stores copies of the original CDs, while the second unit contains additional static data files that are entered by our hospital staff. These online storage devices provide trouble-free access to materials like clinical reference data, allowing us to better service our expanding staff and patient load.

Our critical server data is safer, too. The two NAS devices are backed up onto two Sony StorStation LIB-162/A3 tape libraries that allow us to perform nightly backups of 415 GB. Sony's Advanced Intelligent Tape (AIT-3) format has a native storage capacity of 100 GB per tape (260 GB compressed) and a native transfer rate of 16 MB/sec. (31 MB/sec. compressed). We have found it to be a speedy format that more than doubles the storage capacity of our old DLT tape drives.

Replacing 24 splintered, individual server backups with this new centralized library solution assures tighter administrative control for the protection and archiving of precious patient records and hospital files. As an added bonus, the NAS devices also reduce LAN traffic, improving our overall network performance and response time.

HARDWARE AND COMPONENTS

The Sony FSV-M1 NAS devices provide centralized data archiving and protection for our Windows NT/ 2000 critical data. The devices are hosted by a Compaq dedicated server and SCSI adaptor. The solution is managed by VERITAS Back Exec 8.6 software with Exchange, SQL and Remote agents for Windows NT/2000. The two StorStation LIB-162/A3 tape libraries run 18 backup jobs nightly, encompassing more than 24 servers and 1,000 desktop machines. Servers backed up include those running Exchange, SQL, HR, patient record and employee network home directory data.

RESULTS

In the past year, we have consolidated our backup jobs, provided a single point of management for all backup issues, eliminated failed backup jobs due to missed tape changes and eliminated downtime in production servers due to hardware failures. In other words, we have successfully treated our storage shortfall by moving away from splintered, individual server-based backup and recovery to a true enterprise backup and recovery solution.