Dell Fluid Data architecture provides the backbone for patient information at Kansas Spine Hospital
Once a patient is discharged and billing is complete, there is no reason to keep the data on the faster, more expensive drives. Dell Fluid Data architecture allows us to use a combination of drive technologies to save money and provide better performance.
Michael Knocke, Chief Information Officer, Kansas Spine Hospital
The doctors and staff of Wichita’s Kansas Spine Hospital like to look at the big picture—literally. When providing world-class spine surgeries and other orthopedic procedures, the facility’s nationally recognized staff relies on state-of-the-art imaging equipment to diagnose conditions and perform procedures with a level of accuracy that many would call miraculous.
The hospital’s commitment to technology is comprehensive. When the facility opened its doors in 2003, it was one of the first fully digital hospitals in the nation. “Our electronic patient records contain everything from billing information to radiology images,” says Michael Knocke, chief information officer at Kansas Spine Hospital.
As those digital records began to accumulate, however, the hospital IT group needed a more flexible, long-term storage solution. With more than 80 percent of the hospital’s data flowing into its picture archive communication system (PACS), the existing storage was proving difficult to scale. “It was extremely time-consuming and expensive to add disk drives to the system,” says Knocke. “With our two-person IT staff, we needed a cost-effective solution that fit our long-term growth strategy and didn’t force us to hire a new administrator with specialized skills.”
Given the vital nature of the patient information system, the team also had to consider reliability and business continuity. “The patient information system needs to be up and running around the clock,” says Knocke. “If the system goes down for any significant amount of time, it will definitely impact patient care.”
Additionally, the hospital IT team wanted to implement a more efficient backup strategy. “We tried to run backups overnight, but the old process took twice as long as it should have,” says Knocke. “It had a serious impact on our production environment’s performance during the day, which is when we do most of the procedures. We can’t afford to sacrifice any system response time while backups are running.”
Centralized SAN management
After evaluating storage systems from several vendors, Kansas Spine Hospital selected the Dell Compellent Storage Center storage area network (SAN) with Dell Fluid Data architecture.
The IT group deployed a two-tiered production SAN, a second business continuity SAN housed in an adjacent room and a third disaster recovery (DR) system at a remote location. Dell Compellent Enterprise Manager software has helped to dramatically simplify SAN administration across the three sites. The storage resource management (SRM) tool empowers Kansas Spine Hospital with a real-time, centralized view and reporting for all Dell Compellent systems.
“The types of images we deal with can be quite data-intensive, but within a few seconds we can determine how much storage each application is using and whether we’re nearing our thresholds,” says Knocke. “Dell Compellent Enterprise Manager provides a quick visual reference that helps us manage storage allocation.”
Thin provisioning and automated tiered storage keep costs down
Thin provisioning with Dell Compellent Dynamic Capacity gives the hospital the flexibility it needs to accommodate the ever-expanding PACS data, without incurring great expense for allocated but unused storage. With Dell Compellent, the team can provision sufficient storage for applications without consuming physical capacity until data is written by the application.
“I don’t need to buy more disks than I actually need,” Knocke says. “I can allocate 1TB to PACS image files with Dell Compellent thin provisioning, knowing that it won’t be used immediately. If that application does eventually require additional space, I can shift allocation from other applications.”
Kansas Spine Hospital also reduces expenses by using automated tiered storage with Dell Compellent Data Progression to dynamically classify and move data at the block level from one storage tier to another. Previously, the hospital relied on DVD media to store older data. Today, Kansas Spine has found a way to cost-effectively keep inactive data online.
“When a patient is in our care, we need fast access to his or her records. But once a patient is discharged and billing is complete, there is no reason to keep the data on the faster, more expensive drives,” says Knocke. “Dell Fluid Data allows us to use a combination of drive technologies to save money and provide better performance.”
Dell Compellent Remote Instant Replay helps ensure patient record availability and security
Dell Compellent Remote Instant Replay feature has helped the hospital strengthen its business continuity and disaster recovery solutions at a fraction of the cost of other vendors. “It would have been too expensive to replicate all of our data with SANs from other vendors. The bandwidth costs alone would have been prohibitive,” Knocke says.
Knocke estimates that the Dell Compellent SAN has helped the hospital save at least 85 percent of the acquisition costs of a traditional backup solution. “We were considering a $100,000 backup solution for our production site, but with the Dell Compellent SAN, we needed to spend only about $15,000 for a backup server, software and a tape drive,” he says. “That was a huge win for us. It saved us a lot of money and achieved the scalability and level of functionality we needed.”
Dell Compellent Remote Instant Replay replicates Replays between local and remote sites, ensuring business continuity. Its intuitive wizard-based setup means Kansas Spine Hospital can set up replication with just six clicks and replicate over low-cost IP lines. The IT group can now run backups from the business continuity SAN without affecting the performance of the production environment.
If a problem does occur with an application server, Knocke’s team can have systems up and running again much more quickly than before.
“Previously it might have taken us several hours to recover from a server failure because we had to find and restore from a tape,” he says. “Now we can recover directly from disk. We can have the system back up and running in minutes—which allows us to provide a high level of patient care.”