PoINT Storage Manager at St. Augustine Clinics

Euroson America, Inc., the North American distribution partner for PoINT
Software & Systems GmbH announces the St. Augustine clinics adaptation
of PoINT Storage Manager.

The St. Augustine
clinics is a company in the health and social
services in the Lower Rhine, Germany. For IT solutions they rely on the FAS
storage solutions with appropriate NetApp Metro Cluster configurations. The
ever-increasing volume of data led to the requirement for transparent migration
of large volumes of inactive data (50TB) from these
systems to SATA RAID-based NetApp FAS systems.

The St. Augustine clinics selected the tiered storage architecture of PoINT Storage Manager. As a result
the company can use its primary storage more efficiently by migration of
inactive data from high cost NetApp storage to the archive tier. All data
remains permanently accessible through the NetApp ONTAP OS. For additional
security the migrated data is also replicated onto an existing Quantum i500 LTO
tape library. The tape library was previously used for backup purposes and was
of sufficient size to allow it to be used additionally for archiving. Overall,
the St. Augustine clinics realized significant cost and time savings mainly by
the reduced volume of primary storage.

The head of system integration, Christoph Sulik, was responsible for the task of
introducing a solution that satisfies the above requirements by implementing a
tiered storage architecture: "We evaluated the products of
different manufacturers and decided on the Storage Manager software solution
from PoINT Software & Systems because it provides a holistic approach that
meets all of our requirements and is also recommended by NetApp"

Sulik
explains that the integrated support in PoINT Storage Manager of both NetApp
systems and the Quantum i500 LTO tape library was a criterion for the choice of
the PoINT product.

Another significant feature is the ‘pass-through’ functionality of the PoINT software which is not
available from any of the evaluated competitors. In daily use (ie medical
findings) often only certain portions of the data (ie treatment and examination
data) are required from a saved file. This makes up only a small subset of the
total database. If a file has been archived it is not necessary to restore this
file to the primary storage when these cases are requested. PoINT Storage
Manager implements a ‘pass-through’ approach which
eliminates this problem by providing the required blocks directly to the
application without restoring the file to primary storage. Thus, the
applications work much more efficiently and primary storage is not burdened
unnecessarily.

The need for reliability was obtained by installing PoINT Storage Manager
in a Windows Server cluster environment. Installation and start of operation
testing was completed in a day. Customer-specific additional requirements that
arose in the test phase were implemented promptly PoINT.

"Not only the product features of
PoINT, but also the excellent support and the willingness to provide
project-specific extensions for our requirements have confirmed our choice,"
summarizes Sulik.

With the introduction of tiered storage architecture using PoINT Storage
Manager, the hospitals can reduce their storage costs. The NetApp Metro Cluster
systems can now be used much more efficiently, and by incorporating the
existing tape library compliance requirements can also be met.

PoINT Storage Manager
is available in the US from Euroson America.