JPS Health Network Deploys Virtual Instruments NetWisdom

Virtual Instruments announced JPS Health Network, a network of health care facilities based in Tarrant County, Texas, is using NetWisdom in their main campus data center.

NetWisdom is being used to help the organization proactively automate the monitoring and analysis of the affect the SAN has on application availability in order to avoid problems and anticipate performance and availability issues before users and application owners suffer the consequences. In addition, with NetWisdom, they now have a common monitoring, measurement and reporting solution to help communicate on an on-going basis with the server and application administrators, as well as their vendors.

Facing an increasingly digitized patient-facing environment, JPS was challenged with tight budgets and with getting more performance from their existing IT resources. One of the key challenges was in maintaining traditional high service levels in the face of 50% annual digital data storage growth on their 200+terabyte Fiber Channel SAN, while keeping costs down. With a growing number of ports and disks, lack of standardization amongst vendor-supplied tools, and an inability to do predictive problem avoidance, it was becoming a challenge to manage the SAN. The only way to do this without dramatically increasing the staff size was to find some way to proactively automate the monitoring and analysis of the affect of the SAN on application availability.

"We’ve used NetWisdom to find and resolve four problems since implementation, before they would have eventually caused an outage," said Christopher Carlton, storage team lead, JPS Health Network. "We’re essentially using it as an additional person on our team. Once you have it, you experience tremendous value."

Prior to the NetWisdom deployment, JPS would have to wait until a problem, such as an outage or a performance issue, was reported. In a typical scenario, they would look at individual components, system logs, etc. and perform ‘process of elimination’ troubleshooting. With NetWisdom, problems were detected much earlier – before they became serious – and root-cause analysis became much more efficient. For instance, with NetWisdom, a problem the server team initially thought was SCSI controller-related turned out to be an HBA issue, saving potentially days or weeks of exhaustive investigative work.

"The unique challenges of a health care IT environment make a vendor agnostic monitoring solution an essential component in helping to predict and prevent application outages caused by the SAN or newly deployed virtualization technologies," said Mark Urdahl, chief executive officer, Virtual Instruments. "JPS Health Network is a great example of how NetWisdom, serving as an extra set of eyes and ears, can help organizations with exponential data growth control costs and maintain a high level of service."

JPS Health Network’s Fort Worth datacenter has a 200+ terabyte SAN growing at over 40% annually connected to 35 application servers through a Brocade fabric supporting 300 fibre channel SAN ports. To optimize budget and resources, JPS uses both VMware server virtualization and storage virtualization. Storage is provided by HDS USP/V virtualized storage systems, with two modular systems virtualized behind it and another standalone modular array. There are now 3 full-time staff managing all storage and backup related tasks for the entire JPS organization, supporting all office functions like email and billing, and the ongoing migration to online patient records.