Moncrief Cancer Center Ensures Continuous Availability of Patient Data
Overview
Moncrief Cancer Center provides state-of-the-art cancer treatment services through facilities in the Dallas / Fort Worth area. As one of the nation's premier cancer treatment centers, Moncrief has established its respected position by adopting innovative technology to provide consistently superior customer care. With more than 1,200 new patients each year benefiting from the Center's services, Moncrief selected Compellent to meet its need for a redundant and scaleable enterprise storage solution to deliver superior customer care.
Situation
Moncrief provides email and data storage to all of its internal departments including clinical, lab and administration. Before implementing the Compellent storage area network (SAN), Moncrief stored more than two terabytes of data across 11 different servers. With major application upgrades occurring on a quarterly basis, ensuring uninterrupted access to patient records and network services was an ongoing challenge.
To maintain system availability, Moncrief's information technology (IT) staff regularly spent long weekends creating test servers and performing backups. Staff frequently waited hours and occasionally more than a day for data to copy while performing routine system maintenance. With an expanding need for data storage Ð especially for patient records and imaging data within clinical services Ð Moncrief required a storage solution that would easily manage test environments, reduce administrative time and provide a stable and secure platform for continuous data access.
Solution
During a Compellent product demonstration, Dawn Hauser, Moncrief's IT manager, noted several unique features that would provide her and her staff peace of mind while dramatically improving the way Moncrief manages patient data. Today, Compellent's Storage Center allows Moncrief to cut the creation of test environments and backups from hours or days down to minutes. Additionally, Storage Center enables Moncrief to simplify data resource administration and centralized data storage to a single, secure location. With an eye to the future, Moncrief is now beginning to budget for a Compellent SAN at a second location to provide comprehensive redundancy. The new technology investments will allow Moncrief's staff to continue to provide superior customer care as the Center grows.
Providing a Safety Net for Continuous Availability
Providing uninterrupted access to applications and network resources with limited staff and ongoing software updates is a significant challenge. Fearing the situation where new software crashes a server and knocks users offline, Moncrief's systems administrators were relegated to late weeknights or weekend overtime to perform routine system upgrades.
With the Compellent SAN, system maintenance occurs during the workday while users are online, but without fear of bringing down the system. Administrators can use Storage Center's Data Instant Replay to create a complete point-in-time copy and map it to a test environment within minutes. Software upgrades are completed safely and securely during regular business hours.
Turning Data Storage Into a Strategic Asset
While many managers look at data storage as simply another expense from the IT department, Hauser sees it as a strategic asset. Prior to bringing the proposal for the SAN to Moncrief's executive director, she built organization-wide support by demonstrating the enterprise-wide benefits of Compellent's unlimited expansion and continuous recovery to department managers. As a result, Moncrief's executive director now sees data storage as a strategic investment that will allow the Center to continue to provide exemplary customer service.
Increasing IT Service Without Adding IT Staff
With storage capacity growing at 50 percent per year, the weekly and sometimes daily burden of monitoring storage across 11 servers was outpacing staff resources. Now all data is centrally stored and managed in a single pool of available storage. In just a few minutes additional storage capacity is added without interruption or staff overtime. With Storage Center, Moncrief's staff can continue to expand network services without additional staff or outside consultants.