Profile:
Major full-service hospital, Tampa FL.
Need:
Older system for backup falling out of HIPAA-compliance; data volume growth outpacing processing capability.
Solution:
Hitachi Protection Platform (HPP) S-Series; Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) S-Series
Outcomes:
Regulatory compliance, smaller footprint, faster and more secure backup and restore, simpler administration, quick installation, improved data mobility, and future expansion potential with low-cost components.
Coping month to month. With an eight-year-old system, this large urban hospital was barely managing its routine data backups, which grew larger and took longer every month. Although the system was operational and approaching the end of its useful life, the hospital saw no immediately compelling reason to explore its options.
Then the other shoe dropped. The system manufacturer announced it planned to end support for this generation of software and hardware, which immediately raised the urgency level to critical. . When a core system risks the loss of legal compliance, its owner must respond, but how?
Tactical: Patch, overhaul, and extend. The client could add sufficient capacity to its existing system to accelerate backups and return to technical compliance, which resolves the problem, at least temporarily.
Strategic: Acquire a higher-capability system. Eight years is an eon in baseline system-architecture terms. Across-the-board advances in performance, scalability, availability, efficiency, and security mean that a contemporary system delivers much more than incremental improvements. The downside? Higher initial cost.
Exploring the options. While Edge Solutions’ Design Your Edge™ process assesses performance requirements and configuration cost tradeoffs, it does something even more vital: It sets any acquisition decision in the broader context of client business concerns and objectives. For the hospital, surging data volume from electronic medical records, Internet of Things monitoring devices, payment processing, and sophisticated patient-outcome metrics meant that the decision was actually less about regulatory compliance than it was about deliberately preparing for a data-intensive future.
Choosing the future. Given that any “quick fix” would only postpone the day of reckoning, the client chose to replace its system with a combined Hitachi Protection Platform (for secure, cloud-ready backup and restore) and Hitachi Content Platform (for enterprise-scale data mobility and management).
From its first day of operation, the selected system:
- Brought the hospital into regulatory compliance for secure backup, restore, and archiving
- Reduced the system backup-and-restore time by 50%]
- Automated secure data backup to a second offsite location, enhancing disaster-recovery and business-continuity resilience
- Via automatic, optimized load-balancing, created greater system availability and reliability for all users
- Provided built-in, rack-level redundancy
- Dramatically reduced the system’s physical footprint and power draw
- Enabled Edge engineers to fully deploy and go live in two weeks
Over time, the new Hitachi data protection and content infrastructure will power a broad range of positive business outcomes. It will:
- Make the inevitable expansion more affordable due to the use of commodity hardware components and standard communications protocols such as S3, NFS, and iSCSI
- Provide new, centralized support for enterprise business units and partners, adding to strategic flexibility and competitive differentiation
- Allow hospital partners to more efficiently sync and share data
- Offer new content metadata, search, and analytics capabilities, particularly for unstructured data
- Position the hospital to shift some services from on-premise to the Cloud whenever that move makes tactical sense
- Permanently cut system administration overhead and other TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) factors
From technology to patient care. With the HPP infrastructure in place, the hospital could return its focus to its core healthcare business, confident that it had invested in a solution that did far more than simply remediate a backup problem or address an out-of-compliance crisis. The client\’s IT team could now offer every business unit within the enterprise a broader menu of high-performance, cost-effective services.
Viewing client needs through a strategic business lens. Edge Solutions’ forward-looking domain expertise led the hospital to a simpler technical environment, clearer growth paths, lower risk, and greater overall corporate agility.
That’s the Edge Solutions advantage.
Technical specifications for this Edge implementation:
HPP S-Series
HCP S-Series