DataCore, a leader in software-defined storage, continues to expand its U.S. market presence at a significant pace as it adds more healthcare organizations to a long list of hospitals and caregivers it is helping to meet pressing IT challenges, such as reducing storage costs, protecting data and eliminating downtime.

Over the last twelve months, many new enterprises serving the healthcare market joined longstanding DataCore customers such as Continuum Health Partners, Inc. (now part of Mount Sinai Health), Maimonides Medical Center, New York Presbyterian Hospital, Englewood Hospital and Medical Center, and Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center Inc., in realizing important benefits from software-defined storage (SDS) with DataCore SANsymphony-V. Moreover, many healthcare-focused organizations in the U.S. expanded their use of DataCore in the last year, including Arnot Health, Family Healthcare, Hanover Hospital, Homecare Homebase, Inland Empire Health, Mission Community Hospital, OrthoNY (formerly Northeast Orthopaedics), and Stormont Vail Healthcare, among others.

Information technology managers in the healthcare industry are under enormous pressure to deliver more storage capacity, better resiliency and faster performance – all while managing costs. DataCore addresses these challenges with SDS solutions that deliver significant performance improvements, better utilization of storage devices and substantially improved reliability through redundancy. A cost-effective storage infrastructure that allows “Freedom of Choice” in using any hypervisor, any storage, on any server platform, DataCore SANsymphony-V software enables healthcare providers to virtualize their storage devices – eliminating storage silos by creating a pool of storage that is managed centrally by one platform delivering unified storage services.

Maimonides Medical Center – Defining Mission-Critical Storage Its Own Way

Maimonides Medical Center is among the largest independent teaching hospitals in the U.S. and has more than 800 physicians. The hospital chose DataCore software from a number of hardware and software competitors based on its ability to securely and seamlessly manage the hospital’s storage resource expansion. DataCore’s software-centric approach to storage virtualization and its inherent ability to “thin provision” storage capacity has proven to be an invaluable service in eliminating the labor-intensive need for system administrators to micro-manage the capacity requirements of life-critical applications.

Maimonides started with software-defined storage before it was fashionable. DataCore has been installed at Maimonides for almost fifteen years now, working across multiple generations and different storage vendors. An overriding benefit that DataCore delivers is continuous availability. Critical applications continue to run and access data without being impacted by storage disruptions. The DataCore solution also has enabled the hospital to take a cost-effective approach when addressing its overall storage needs and to consolidate storage management for mission-critical patient records.

Four pairs of DataCore SANsymphony-V currently run on IBM servers – enabling applications to be “metro-clustered” between two different sites. Synchronous mirroring and transparent ‘No Touch’ failover on each side provide continuous availability to over 1 petabyte of data.

“Everything that is mission-critical to the running of the hospital is supported by the DataCore virtualized storage platform,” explained Rog Fe de Leon, Head of the Storage Group, Maimonides. “Users not only receive faster access to data, but they benefit from more server capacity as well.”

Englewood Hospital and Medical Center – Adding Redundancy and Reducing Storage Costs

Englewood Hospital and Medical Center (EHMC) had forecast 10x data growth in four years. The IT team was also struggling to cope with frequent data migrations for hardware upgrades and ongoing hospital expansion. Since deploying DataCore, EHMC has reduced storage-related downtime and achieved 24/7 availability, and has also reduced costs through tiered storage, increased capacity utilization by reclaiming under-utilized capacity, and increased performance for all of its applications – all while extending the life of storage investments.

Notably, all VM's are stored on the DataCore system - Active Directory, Microsoft Exchange, Oracle PeopleSoft, Microsoft SQL Servers, as well as the PACS and VNA system.

“The capabilities of DataCore SANsymphony-V allow us to continue to deliver patient care seamlessly and without interruption, which is critical to our mission,” commented Ronald Fuschillo, Chief Information Officer at EHMC. EHMC is an acute care teaching hospital known for its cardiac program and its bloodless surgery program.

Mission Community Hospital – Eliminating Its Dependence on Expensive Hardware

Mission Community Hospital, a 145-bed short-term acute facility located in north San Fernando Valley, Calif., has overcome its most pressing IT challenge – a dependence on expensive hardware – with a flexible software-defined storage architecture made possible by DataCore SANsymphony-V.

The hospital had a lot of direct-attached storage as well as multiple, older servers where the storage disks resided within the older servers themselves. The process of capacity management and storage provisioning was very disjointed. With data storage growth rates climbing, Mission Community Hospital needed to find an economic way to add more capacity. Moreover, the hospital’s CIO sought to open up his purchasing options and free the institution from hardware and system vendor lock-in.

With two copies of SANsymphony-V now running on Dell R720 servers, one software platform unifies all storage resources – making storage management automated. Migrations are simple, physical storage is now agnostic, and downtime has been eliminated.

“The fact is that we are not tied to a particular vendor,” stated Dustin Fennel, Chief Information Officer at Mission Community Hospital. “With DataCore as a comprehensive storage services platform, we can always just get the best storage for what we are trying to accomplish without having to learn a new management system for every model.”

Greater Productivity and Flexibility Driving Momentum

“For those in healthcare IT, it’s about maximizing IT infrastructure performance, availability and utilization by productively using smart software to virtualize and add the needed flexibility to meet changing demands,” said George Teixeira, CEO of DataCore. “Healthcare institutions of all kinds and sizes are turning to DataCore because they realize that IT has moved beyond just the hardware for servers and for storage – it is about the intelligence of the software that runs in conjunction with those devices.”

To learn more about how healthcare organizations are using DataCore software as the cornerstone of their IT infrastructure, click here.