Business Challenge

A major healthcare provider's enterprise storage growth was increasing at a pace of more than 50 percent a year. It had a limited budget, which was further stretched by new HIPAA requirements for improving security. Because of new long-term retention requirements for medical imaging and other clinical and back office data, the firm was facing a new set of increasingly-complex data management challenges. Backups were slow and routinely missed the application downtime window. Since there was no process in place to classify any information, the organization was storing all information on enterprise class storage, regardless of the application performance and availability requirements.

Solution

By developing a storage strategy blueprint, Forsythe used a variety of data collection tools, including structured interviews and observation techniques, to obtain a holistic view of the company's current storage architecture. Input from both technical and business representatives was obtained to define a future architecture for increasing capacity and variable performance requirements.

Forsythe designed and provided the company with a tiered storage architecture that enabled it to react to uncertain capacity requirements, meet backup windows, and integrate a disaster recovery and business continuity plan. In addition, Forsythe helped the customer further develop information management policy to match the performance requirements of each class of data with the cost of the storage tier. The customer then had the ability to build a primary, secondary, and tertiary storage architecture that provided adequate space on its enterprise-class storage for dynamic, transactional information. It could then move static information to lower cost, long-term storage. To implement the new storage blueprint, Forsythe provided an unbiased approach to procuring the architecture and integrating the topology.

Results

The healthcare provider now has long-term, scalable storage infrastructure, an information management policy, and processes to move information across storage tiers throughout its lifecycle. System downtime decreased significantly and backup windows are now being met. The storage environment has a strong foundation as well as the flexibility for meeting advanced disaster recovery. This enabled the company to reduce operational expenses in excess of $16,000 per month.