After outgrowing its storage infrastructure, University HealthSystem Consortium partnered with Hitachi Data Systems to deploy a virtualized, tiered storage environment. UHC has improved uptime from a reasonable “three nines” to 100% and now feels confident performing upgrades as needed due to Hitachi’s 100% data availability warranty. The new solution also has delivered 26% savings in disk. Learn how UHC achieved such dramatic results (and you can too) by reading this end user case study.
Hitachi Breathes New Life into
Critical Online Knowledge Base
Applications A Case Study at University HealthSystem Consortium Solution Summary
By Rick Freedman
November 2008
Executive Summary
Challenge University HealthSystem Consortium had outgrown its existing infrastructure and storage capabilities. The organization needed a way to prevent frequent outages, avoid the downtime required for changes and updates, improve the poor response time for maintenance services due to old technology and lack of dedicated personnel, and increase utilization of storage facilities.
Solution Hitachi Data Systems replaced UHC's old StorageTek FLX280 system with a Hitachi TUniversal Storage Platform V running Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software. Hitachi Data Systems also implemented a tiered storage environment for UHC by virtualizing modular storage capacity as Tiers 2 and 3. Additional upgrades included remote replication ®capabilities, blade server technologies and migration from Microsoft SQL2000 to SQL2005.
"Managing virtual volumes with Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning and our ability to migrate data without downtime are absolutely brilliant." Steve Carlberg Principal Network Administrator UHC
Benefits UHC's new virtualization capabilities have significantly enhanced the system's storage utilization, performance, reliability and ease of management. With Hitachi Tiered Storage Manager software, data migration from and to Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning volumes is easy and can be accomplished at convenient times, with no downtime. The UHC storage team can also rapidly move applications from Tier 1 to Tier 2 storage, with the ability to quickly move the applications back to Tier 1 if they experience any problems.
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Contents About the University HealthSystem Consortium............................................................................................. 1 Suffering from a Dated Storage Technology.................................................................................................... 1 Weighing the Options......................................................................................................................................... 2 A Painless Operation.......................................................................................................................................... 2 The Powerful Antidote from Hitachi Data Systems ......................................................................................... 4 An Excellent Prognosis...................................................................................................................................... 4 Minimal Downtime............................................................................................................................................... 4 Disk and Footprint Savings ............................................................................................................................... 5 Ease of Management .......................................................................................................................................... 5 Flexibility.............................................................................................................................................................. 6 Better Performance............................................................................................................................................. 6 Taking Data Storage to New Levels .................................................................................................................. 7
Hitachi Breathes New Life into
Critical Online Knowledge Base
Applications A Case Study at the University HealthSystem Consortium Solution Summary
By Rick Freedman
About the University HealthSystem Consortium The University HealthSystem Consortium (UHC) is an alliance of academic medical centers and affiliated hospitals representing approximately 90 percent of the nation's non-profit academic medical centers. For more than two decades, UHC has been a "catalyst for change" - offering its members unique programs and services that improve clinical, operational and financial performance. The organization's exclusive offerings rel... [download for more]
