University of Texas Medical Branch Standardized on NetApp Solutions

NetApp announced that the University of Texas
Medical Branch (UTMB) has standardized on NetApp storage solutions
across its infrastructure. UTMB now uses NetApp storage for everything
from patient care to payroll, dramatically slashing backup and
recovery time and significantly reducing overhead and the amount of
storage space required.

UTMB is a leading medical research institution and health care
provider that is based in Galveston, Texas, with satellite clinics
across the state. The medical center faced the challenge of finding a
cost-effective and, above all, reliable storage solution to support
multiple systems and safeguard patient data and research information.
Fast, always-on access to patient data is critical to UTMB. But the
Galveston campus also manages the institution’s statewide WAN services
such as an electronic medical record (EMR) project, Microsoft
Exchange, Solaris, Oracle SQL and Peoplesoft, among others.
In 2001, UTMB was looking to replace its existing storage solution
with something new.

"Since we were upgrading, we took the opportunity to look at
different vendors," said Brian Grimm, manager of Projects and IT
Architecture at UTMB. "The vendor who had been supporting the existing
storage system recommended NetApp as an alternative solution, so we
began to evaluate it. We were impressed by the NetApp unified storage
capability, redundancy, and ease of management."

UTMB initially installed a NetApp FAS940 cluster and NearStore
R150 running Oracle SQL. Based on the initial experience, Grimm added
several other NetApp offerings to the UTMB storage network, including
a FAS960 cluster, a NearStore R200, a FAS3050 cluster, and a
standalone FAS3050 to support near-line disk storage. UTMB has
consolidated almost all of its flat file storage on NetApp and plans
to migrate most of its enterprise SAN-level and large application
storage to a FAS6030 cluster.

Since transitioning to NetApp, UTMB has improved reliability and
reduced backup and recovery time by 80%. The center has also been able
to grow from 9TB to 250TB in raw storage capacity while consolidating
all its Fibre Channel SAN, NFS, FCP, CIFS, and iSCSI services onto one
platform. This unified storage capability, combined with high
utilization via NetApp FlexVol, gives the NetApp SAN a very low
total cost of ownership. NetApp Snapshot technology simplifies
backup and recovery, which now takes minutes instead of hours and uses
approximately 70% of the disk space the previous system required.
Together, simplified data management and reduced storage requirements
have translated into a savings of 60% on staffing costs.

With all these benefits, reliability has been the greatest asset
NetApp has brought to UTMB, achieving 99.999% uptime. NetApp Global
Services helped design UTMB’s network to take best advantage of
performance and stability. UTMB also has NetApp SupportEdge Premium
support on all its systems. SupportEdge Premium combines expert
on-site resources with innovative remote capabilities to meet the
needs for superior comprehensive and proactive support services that
most enterprise environments require.

"With the diversity of our systems, we need flexible unified
storage that is easy to manage," says Grimm. "By having, FCP, NFS,
CIFS, and iSCSI on the same platform, NetApp helps us save time and
effort managing data access. It’s easier for users, too. When
developers need to upload spreadsheets to an EMR application running
on UNIX, they don’t need an FTP security system. Instead, they can
just use Microsoft security."

"NetApp strives to provide our customers with complete solutions
to complex, varied challenges," said Patrick Rogers, vice president of
Solutions Marketing at NetApp. "By implementing such a wide variety of
products and services and consolidating all on one platform, UTMB is a
great example of the customer experience NetApp can provide."

University of Texas
Medical Branch

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