Healthcare Group Heals Exchange

With all the growing storage needs created by medical imaging, you wouldnt expect email to be the major storage concern for a healthcare center.

But that’s what was bugging Virtua Health's Tom Pacek the most, prompting him to turn to continuous data protection (CDP) to solve the problem. Virtua Health is a network of hospitals, outpatient centers, and nursing homes with headquarters in Marlton, N.J. Pacek, vice president of technology, manages 13 Tbytes of storage on an EMC Clariion CX700 SAN, which he backs up to a Clariion disk library virtual tape system as well as a Sun StorageTek tape library.

Two of the system’s hospitals are using storage-intensive Picture Archival and Communications Systems (PACS) for radiology, with two more planning to add them over the next few months. After that, the hospitals will begin using PACS for cardiology.

Despite all the high-end medical technologies at Virtua Health, Pacek’s users were most concerned with Microsoft Exchange. (See Email Growth Spells Etrouble.) And with 1,800 physicians and 7,200 employees in the system, Pacek was most concerned with keeping Exchange data from choking the SAN.

“People can’t live without email applications, just as much as they can’t live without clinical apps anymore,” he says. “Even with all the storage we have, space is an issue. People want to grow and grow their folders. We would constantly tell people they have to clean up their email space, but we needed a more efficient way.”