OSF Healthcare System Deploys EMC Information Lifecycle Management Solution

ORLANDO, Fla., (HIMSS), Feb. 23 /PRNewswire/ -- OSF Healthcare System, an integrated network of seven healthcare facilities in Illinois and Michigan, is implementing EMC Corporation's full range of networked storage and open software to roll out information lifecycle management (ILM), a strategy that assigns storage tiers offering varying levels of availability, performance and cost to information assets whose value changes over time. By implementing an EMC-based ILM strategy, OSF Healthcare System will meet its rapidly growing data storage and compliance needs while dramatically cutting storage costs and improving information availability to speed decision-making about patient care.

Mike Nauman, OSF Healthcare System's Chief Information Officer, said, "Our storage needs are growing by 50% annually because of our exploding volume of medical testing. It was clear that we needed a very different storage strategy if we were going to provide the same level of data access and availability -- and stay on budget. With EMC's ILM, we can classify and prioritize our data based on its time-critical demand, then store it according to different requirements for accessibility, response time and expense. Also, ILM will allow us to speed the delivery of critical information to our medical staff and patients to improve clinical work flow productivity, while significantly lowering our data management costs."

Jim Doedtman, OSF Healthcare System's Technical Planning Manager, said, "Distributing our data across multiple storage levels will give us tremendous cost savings. For instance, we will be able to move sleep-study image data from Symmetrix(R) to Centera(TM) for longer-term archiving, helping us comply with HIPAA requirements. ILM also will help us address our Microsoft Exchange e-mail environment, which is growing exponentially. By moving 70 percent of our e-mail files to Centera, we will be able to meet our service level requirements for backup and restore, which we can't do now due to the sheer size of the environment. Additionally, being able to dramatically decrease the size of these data stores will boost our system performance."

OSF Healthcare System's 80-terabyte EMC infrastructure will span multiple storage tiers based on business processes and the application requirements:

High-End: A centralized EMC Storage Area Network (SAN) at OSF headquarters, composed of EMC Symmetrix storage and EMC Connectrix(TM) Fibre Channel switches, stores data and images for OSF Healthcare System's high-end critical business, clinical and infrastructure systems, including IDX CareCast HIS and Microsoft Exchange e-mail.

Mid-Tier: Data for mid-tier business, clinical and infrastructure systems is stored on CLARiiON(R) Fibre Channel storage systems, which are located at all of OSF Healthcare System's regional hospitals and corporate headquarters. To reduce costs even further at the mid-tier, OSF will utilize CLARiiON CX600 with ATA, providing a low-cost SAN and network attached storage (NAS) solution for its business and clinical systems. In its NAS environment, OSF Healthcare System also utilizes EMC's Celerra(R) Clustered Network Server and Celerra NS600G for high-end and mid-tier file sharing, respectively.

Archive: EMC Centera content addressed storage (CAS) is targeted as the archiving environment for many of OSF's systems. These include Siemens and Philips picture archiving and communications systems (PACS) solutions, document imaging, sleep-study information and infrastructure systems such as Microsoft Exchange traditional file sharing and KVS Enterprise Vault. OSF Healthcare System replicates Centera information to an offsite location for business continuance.

Providing more insight into how OSF Healthcare System defines its varying tiers, Doedtman stated, "Systems that are not considered 'critical' but require the performance of CLARiiON are targeted for our mid-tier. The cost difference between Symmetrix and CLARiiON Fibre Channel capacity is significant enough to structure CLARiiON SAN as a separate tier of storage. Also at our mid-tier, performance of the CLARiiON with ATA storage for both SAN and NAS has been very impressive. With our classification efforts, we are discovering more systems and information that can be moved to ATA disk technology. As a result, our CLARiiON with ATA and Centera tiers will experience the most significant growth."

As part of its ILM strategy, OSF Healthcare System is upgrading to the latest version of EMC's ControlCenter(TM) storage management software. Doedtman said, "ControlCenter will give us an important trending capability we haven't had before. It will give us much better information on the current state of our Symmetrix and CLARiiON storage, with the ability to run reports for further manipulation and analysis. We also will utilize it to issue alerts when we approach threshold levels across the infrastructure and require more storage capacity. The increase in our storage management efficiency -- to say nothing of having better, more complete information -- will be dramatic. In fact, ControlCenter will help us handle our exponential storage growth with little, if any, increase in our storage management staff."

OSF Healthcare System, based in Peoria, Ill., is utilizing ControlCenter to manage EMC storage for applications running in its HP UX, IBM AIX, Linux, Windows 2000 and 2003 Server operating environments, as well as its IBM mainframe environment. OSF Healthcare System utilizes other EMC software, including TimeFinder(TM), PowerPath(R), Replication Manager and Navisphere(R), to streamline storage management and increase data availability.

EMC Professional Services is assisting OSF Healthcare System with the design and implementation of its EMC ILM infrastructure.

About EMC

EMC Corporation is the world leader in products, services and solutions for information storage and management that help organizations extract the maximum value from their information, at the lowest total cost, across every point in the information lifecycle. Information about EMC's products and services can be found at http://www.emc.com/.

EMC, Symmetrix, CLARiiON, Celerra, PowerPath and Navisphere are registered trademarks, and Centera, ControlCenter, Connectrix and TimeFinder are trademarks of EMC Corporation. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Contact: Christine Westermann 484-322-1002 westermann_christine@emc.com

EMC Corporation

CONTACT: Christine Westermann of EMC Corporation, +1-484-322-1002,
westermann_christine@emc.com

Web site: http://www.emc.com/