Hospital Finds Archiving Remedy

Faced with long-term, large-scale retention of digital records requiring instant retrieval, North Bronx Healthcare Network sought its remedy in archiving.

North Bronx Healthcare Network (NBHN) consists of two hospitals -- Jacobi Medical Center and North Central Bronx Hospital -- and four outpatient treatment centers. Combined, they see about 200,000 emergency room visits and 42,000 admissions per year, generating 1 million CT scans, MRIs, and other electronic studies in the process. Those numbers are always on the rise: NBHN is part of New York City Health and Hospitals Corp., the country's largest municipal healthcare system.

Patient records, billing information, and typical business data also add to the mix. The entire NBHN network currently tops out at 170 Tbytes.

"We were seeing geometric growth in our storage needs," says Dan Morreale, CIO of NBHN. Moreover, legal considerations require the hospitals to store data for a minimum of seven years, and sometimes up to 24 years.

While its radiology and record-keeping had entered the digital age, the NBHN storage methodology seemed relatively Stone Age 18 months ago: a predominantly DAS infrastructure requiring new servers and storage whenever existing systems reached capacity.Eventually, this storage model became untenable in its cost and scale. Not surprisingly, the one-and-a-half administrators of these systems also reached their threshold.

Morreale recognized that NBHN needed to consolidate storage. Fixing on an exact solution, however, was harder than he thought.

"We started out thinking we only needed NAS," he says. "Then every time we looked at a technology, we were convinced we needed it."

Morreale isn't alone. Planning an archiving system that efficiently handles growing data requirements and doesnt break the bank is a tricky proposition these days. A recent Byte and Switch Insider report on the subject, “Archiving: A Plan of Attack,” says the challenges of archiving typically call for a combination of hardware, software, and services.

NBHN's case proved this out. A consultant helped the hosptial network devise a three-stage plan based on data type. The first involved an EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) Symmetrix SAN for important transactional data such as patient and financial records, followed by two Clariion CX600 systems. The hospital then deployed EMC NS600 devices for less critical user data such as MS Word and Excel documents.The bulk of NBHN's data, however, resides on EMC Centera content-addressed storage (CAS) -- roughly 120 Tbytes. The major target of the CAS system: radiology images, which doctors often access for up to a year for comparative studies. NBHN holds this content in primary storage for six months, then migrates it to far cheaper CAS thereafter through the radiology application.

The difference in retrieval time between the primary and archival storage? About two seconds, reports Morreale.

The system worked well enough that NBHN added email messages to its archiving scheme. Using the EMC Legato EmailXtender application, NBHN will migrate the oldest messages when a user's mailbox hits 70 percent of its 100-Mbyte allotment. The system moves recalled messages to local cache and migrates them back to the archive if unchanged. At the same time, file stubs left by the archiving system appear as the original message to the end user.

So far, archiving has helped avoid numerous other costs that would have paled in comparison to the current investment, notes Morreale. He estimates that the hospital staved off two new IT hires, many additional servers and storage, and backup systems and media for those additional systems.

"We had to invest in the overall architecture, but long-term we're saving dollars," says Morreale.— Brett Mendel, Senior Analyst, Byte and Switch Insider

More information about the Byte and Switch Insider report, "“Archiving: A Plan of Attack,”," is available here