New SANs Heal UPMC Constraints

The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) has moved more than 100 Tbytes of data to new SANs since signing a long-term deal with IBM earlier this year, and its technology architect says hes only just begun.

UPMC signed an eight-year, $402 million deal with IBM last April that covers its entire IT infrastructure. Storage consolidation is a huge part of the deal, and the first phase of that involved migrating data off Hewlett-Packard EVA and IBM Sharks to three IBM TotalStorage DS8300 enterprise systems and two DS6800 midrange SANs.

UPMC technology architect Joe Furmanski migrated 120 TBytes of financial systems and electronic medical records to the new IBM systems. That’s just a drop in the bucket for the 19-hospital health center, though. Furmanski says UPMC’s total capacity is 300 TBytes and growing 50 percent every year. Still in the works are plans to implement IBM’s SAN Volume Controller (SVC) to virtualize storage, as well as Tivoli Storage management and monitoring software, additional storage tiers, an email archive system, a director switch upgrade, and perhaps NAS filers.

While Furmanski notes that the financial applications are running faster on his new systems, the main benefit of the IBM deal is cost control. The deal allows the medical center to upgrade while keeping its storage budget at its current level.

“Like most health care facilities, as our infrastructure grows, we can’t expand our staff,” Furmanski says. “We had to find a way of doing more with the same amount of people. They’re not going to give us more money to do things. We challenged the vendors (HP and IBM) to look at our overall budgets for eight years. The $402 million is virtually the same budget we have today.”UPMC has a $5 billion total annual budget, and its IT staff supports 4,000 doctors and more than 40,000 employees. According to Furmanski, UPMC’s IT infrastructure staff is close to 200 including operating systems, network, and desktop support, and help desk. Yet the storage staff includes one full-time administrator and two part-timers.

“Plus we have a couple of high-level people, including myself, who specialize in storage,” he says.

Furmanski has been with UPMC 13 years, and remembers when it was a beta test site for Compaq StorageWorks. Now the current deal calls for UPMC to beta test IBM projects. But for now, he and his small band of storage administrators are implementing SVC and upgrading from McData Intrepid 6140s to its new i10K directors. (See IBM Qualifies McData Switches.)

Furmanski thinks SVC and IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center will help him manage UPMC’s growing storage better, and expects to have them implemented by April. After that, he’ll look at email archiving and evaluate Network Appliance NAS filers that IBM sells through an OEM deal.

Budget wasn’t the only factor that won IBM the UPMC account. Furmanski says, “IBM had a fuller portfolio of products and services.” He also says he experienced none of the bugs that plagued other customers of IBM’s new DS8000 and DS68000 systems. (See IBM Denies Slipped Ship Date).“We had few minor glitches, but we didn’t have any massive errors that we saw reported,” he explains. “A few times we couldn’t use our management consoles, but storage always worked.”

Part of IBM’s deal with UPMC calls for both companies to initially invest $50 million to develop technology for the health care industry. The companies’ investment could grow to $200 million each by the end of the deal.

Furmanski believes it’s too early to predict the types of products that could come out of the arrangement, but a model for the deal is the picture archiving and communications system (PACS) developed at UPMC in 1998. The medical center spun off a company called Stentor Inc., to market the PACS product in 1999. Last July, Royal Philips Electronics bought Stentor for $280 million in cash and made it part of Philips' Medical Systems division. The sale brought UPMC a profit of $36 million.

“That’s a perfect example of what we could do with our research,”

Furmanski says.

— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and SwitchOrganizations mentioned in this article: