Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

CARILION SELECTS DATACORE TO POOL STORAGE CAPACITY

DataCore Software, a leading provider of enterprise-class, open storage networking software, announced that Carilion Health System of Roanoke, Va., has selected DataCore's SANsymphony software to help the century-old hospital network lower the storage management and acquisition costs arising from 60 percent annual data growth by significantly improving the utilization of existing IT assets.

"In service to our community, Carilion implements the best of modern technology, from digital radiology, to computer-based patient records, to Picture Archiving Communications Systems (PACS) in order to deliver best-in-class patient care," said Troy Board, Carilion's chief IT architect. "Now with the help of DataCore's SANsymphony, we'll have a storage management strategy that will ensure instantaneous, 24-7 access to critical data -- while freeing us from the over-allocation and capacity waste of hardware-based approaches."

Carilion's new storage management strategy of leveraging software at the heart of the network represents a major shift in its IT resource planning. Previously, health care applications from different vendors each were packaged with dedicated storage hardware, which led to poor disk utilization -- effectively, approximately 65 percent of the hospital network's overall disk capacity was wasted. SANsymphony will enable Carilion to fully utilize those existing resources by consolidating them into a storage pool from which the software automatically and economically provisions space to each application, as needed. The software accelerates I/O performance through network caching and consolidates different tiers of storage from multiple vendors, ensuring that doctors will be able to access life-critical patient information even faster than before.

An added bonus for the long-term strategy, SANsymphony will give Carilion the flexibility to choose from many competitive disk suppliers as it grows capacity non-disruptively -- a key to lowering the costs and complexity of expansion as they complete other initiatives such as launching a disaster recovery scheme and migrating to a new data center in the next year.

"Carilion Health System is a leader in implementing health care technology solutions for the benefit of their patients and physicians," said Ken Horner, vice president of marketing at DataCore. "The behind-the-scenes benefit of having an efficient, automated and consolidated storage practice that maximizes ROI on technology investments enables Carilion to focus budget and staff resources on further modernizing and improving the quality of the health care services they provide to the community."