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SAVING THE DATA THAT SAVES LIVES

Only a century ago, some doctors still carried little black bags holding leather stethoscopes and glass-stoppered bottles of elixirs and powders -- and medical instruments resembling pliers and pocket knives were not uncommon. Today's doctors' tools include dialysis machines, positron emission tomography (PET) imaging systems for early cancer detection, electronic patient-monitoring devices, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) testing systems, and diagnostic cardiac exams that use DVD technology. These advances have one thing in common -­ computer technology. The emergence of computers has revolutionized how medicine is practiced, and every modern health facility now boasts an assortment of computer-supported equipment. This equipment, in turn, is supported behind the scenes by an ever-progressing infrastructure. When Martin Memorial Health Systems' infrastructure could no longer meet the demand, they turned to Sony for help.

Martin Memorial Health Systems is a community-owned, not for profit health organization that began in 1939 with 23 beds, 10 employees, and 3 physicians. It has since grown to include 2 hospitals, 30 doctors' offices, and 5 off-site medical treatment centers supported by nearly 2600 associates and over 400 physicians on staff. Covering two Florida counties, Martin and St. Lucie, the organization takes strides to remain at the forefront of modern health care, as evidenced in part by their separate, off-site information systems center.

The IS center houses all 24 centralized servers for the entire health organization. Medical, patient, and administrative data from each building is brought to/from these servers via fiber, and must remain accessible 24 hours/day. According to Mark Winning, Technical Systems Analyst for Martin Memorial, the problem being faced was inadequate server backup capability. "We were using four stand-alone DLT auto-changers for this purpose, and were not able to completely back up the system even though we allowed a 12-hour window." Winning was able to replace his four 40GB DLT 4000 units with one Sony LIB-304/A2 tape library equipped with two AIT-2 drives. With the included two 10-slot tape magazines, their storage capacity was upgraded while at the same time achieving three times faster total backup throughput.

Each night, the new library can do a full backup of the 200GB of information from the 1200 users who rely on this NT network (including doctors, nurses, hospital staff, administration, and billing offices). "If the equipment has the capacity to do full backups each night, that is the route we'll take. I'm not a believer in incrementals; they're too much work if we need to recover data," said Winning. The LIB-304/A2 tape library has a sustained transfer rate of up to 15MB/second (with 2:1 compression) compared with the maximum sustained transfer rate of 3MB/second (compressed) that Winning was able to achieve from his DLT units. The Sony AIT-2 tape technology can store up to 50GB of uncompressed data on a single 230-meter cartridge (compared to the 20GB uncompressed capacity of his DLT tapes), and AIT-2 features Sony's Memory-In-Cassette (MIC) embedded chip technology that provides fast data access. In addition, the 304 also incorporates a user-friendly barcode reader, a remote monitoring system, and an import/export mail slot.

Martin Memorial's AIT tape library was purchased from Insight Direct Worldwide Inc (Tempe, Arizona). "Gabe Scales of Insight recommended the Sony library. Initially, I planned to continue buying additional DLT units until I had enough to do the job. Gabe explained that I was only applying a band-aid -- that the cure was a Sony library. He was right," voiced Winning. "And when I got budget approval for two Sony 304 library units, he showed me how one Sony 304 library unit with only 2 drives more than equals what I had in DLT drives."

Their LIB-304 tape library was installed in September 2001 -- in less than three hours. It backs up the data on a 10/100 base T Ethernet network with 1200 nodes of various brands. The average desktop on the system has 64MB of RAM and a 4GB hard drive; most run Windows 95 or 98, though there are also a few NT 4.0 workstations, and a handful running Windows 2000 Professional. The desktops use Microsoft Office and several in-house applications. The servers are mainly Compaq ProLiant 6000 or 7000 models with RAID 5 protection and over 50GB of hard disk space each, running NT 4.0 or NT 2000.

In January 2002, Winning did purchase the second identical unit, for future growth purposes. "I knew that our needs would expand over time, and it made sense to buy the second tape library now since I already had the approval." Though the backup window is no longer constrained, the second unit's extra performance shortens the backup time even more. Full backups are stored for 30 days; the additional tape magazines allow a four-month backup cycle before over-writing the tapes. AIT media has an average life of approximately 30,000 passes or 30 years.

At this point, Martin Memorial is using only 2 tape drives per library unit, though each device is expandable up to four drives. At some future time, Martin Memorial plans to purchase additional drives to fill the four available slots. With all tape slots filled, each tape library's total storage capacity is 3.9TB (2.6:1 compression with ALDC).

"I've been impressed with these 304s since I got them out of the box and started them running. My backup times were cut phenomenally. Sony has a good product and it speaks for itself. As a matter of fact, I recommended them to another client and they purchased three. And I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them to anyone interested in reliable, fast, high-capacity units." Winning also had good things to say about Sony's tech support. "If there was a rating higher than 10, I would give it to Sony."

The LIB-304/A2 Tape Library has a transfer rate of up to 224.6 GB per hour, 2 to 4 AIT drives, and removable 10-slot tape magazines that allow easy media addition, removal, storage, and transport. The integrated barcode reader offers ready media verification and inventory capability, and the remote monitoring through Ethernet allows for easy status checks. Library robotics are rated for over 500,000 cartridge changes for years of reliable operation. The library comes in both stand-alone and 19-inch standard rack mount configurations.