Two zStax StorCore 104 ZFS Storage Systems From Silicon Mechanics for eMed

The eMed Consulting Group hosts data for medical practices that have implemented electronic medical record (EMR) systems.

By hosting their clients’ databases in secure data centers, Louisville, Kentucky-based eMed allows medical practices to concentrate on caring for patients rather than worrying about data safety and security. Originally established to help small- to medium-sized doctors’ offices take advantage of federal incentive payments for implementing EMRs, eMed’s business challenge was to build a storage product with an economical price tag. They met the challenge by selecting Silicon Mechanics, Inc.‘ zStax solution, based on the Xeon processor E5-2600 product family, providing a software-defined storage model that costs a fraction of legacy storage.
 
Hosting EMR data
The eMed Consulting Group was formed to help healthcare providers receive Medicare and Medicaid incentive payments for adopting certified EMR technology. The company uses Aprima Patient Relationship Manager (PRM) software to configure an EMR system appropriate for a practice’s office. They then install the software, train employees on its use, and host their database. This service is for doctors in small- to medium-sized practices, who don’t want to incur the expense and worry of maintaining a server on their premises and paying for the staff to maintain the server and database.
 
Outsourcing EMR data gives doctors access to the eMed Consulting Group’s Payment Card Industry-compliant data centers, and also offers instant HIPAA compliance, as well as physical redundancy to reduce exposure to natural disasters. Hourly backup and 24/7/365 systems monitoring gives doctors even more peace of mind. Connectivity to other laboratory electronic services streamlines recordkeeping processes and test ordering.
 
According to the eMed Consulting Group’s CEO Dave Vrona, eMed’s business model is designed to take complexity away from doctors adopting EMRs.

"Doctors have enough to do running their front office," explains Vrona. "Most have neither the time nor the interest in providing the IT support needed to host their data. They are looking for a lifeboat so they don’t have to be in the IT business."
 
He explains that doctors have to decide how to deploy their information technology, and they must consider up-front equipment costs as well as ongoing maintenance costs. Purchasing a high-quality server with adequate built-in redundancy and backup can be expensive, and to that must be added continual data monitoring and security. Vrona notes that most offices balk at the expense of hiring the necessary IT resources, which tend to come with a steep price.
 
These headaches are why outsourcing data is an attractive proposition. Knowing that the EMR database is safe and secure gives doctors peace of mind, especially considering the critical and private nature of the data collected. Because of the geographical redundancy of outsourced database hosting, doctors know that if there is a disaster in their area, they have the ability to fail over to another datacenter located in a remote area, so their database will be kept up and running.

"Hosting services enabled us to deliver a critical component of the EMR system to smaller offices and clinics at a reasonable cost," says Vrona. "We are providing them what is in effect a private cloud."
 
Search for an affordable storage solution
According to Vrona, resiliency throughout the entire system, from compute, to backup, to network, to storage, is  essential for deploying a private cloud infrastructure. With strong CIO backgrounds, the founders of eMed did a deal of research before arriving at their storage platform, and were early adopters of open-source storage, which can typically deliver a product at a lower cost.

"The price of a solution from a traditional storage vendor would not have been financially feasible when the company was originally launched," says Vrona.

He estimates that using a legacy storage hardware solution would have nearly quadrupled the company’s start-up costs.
 
Instead, the company opted for a zStax ZFS unified storage appliance, to deliver a NAS/SAN storage solution that provides enterprise storage features at mid-tier prices. It was supplied by Silicon Mechanics, a Bothell, Washington-based provider of rackmount servers, storage, and high-performance computing solutions.

"We were looking for cost-effective storage that would support resilient information and multiple servers, and supported virtualized environments so there could be shared storage," says Vrona. "Silicon Mechanics delivers the solution as a bundle and also provides an extremely high level of support during any emergencies."
 
The ability of the zStax storage appliance to tolerate certain failures and keep on running is something that Vrona values above all else. If a piece of hardware in the infrastructure fails, the unit still keeps running.

"If we lose a single disk drive, we don’t lose any data and the system stays up and running. There are redundant power supplies, so there is no downtime if we lose a power supply in one of the devices, and we can change power supplies on the fly. If we lose the entire server, another server takes over."
 
zStax system details
Vrona explains that, while he knew conceptually what he wanted, he relied on product engineer Tommy Scherer of Silicon Mechanics to guide him in terms of what the eMed Consulting Group should consider as they were making choices on the systems needed to get the required resiliency.
 
Their current system, the zStax StorCore 104, is based on the Xeon processor E5-2600 product family with the Intel C602 chipset. Intel servers were the platform of choice for this installation because of their breadth of features and the overall stability and consistency of the platforms through various generations. Intel NICs (Ethernet controllers) offer excellent driver support; in addition, different models and generations of Intel Ethernet and 10GbE controllers work together. This flexibility makes them for solutions like the zStax, since they are compatible with anything Silicon Mechanics might add to the setup. In addition, Intel Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions (Intel AES-NI) accelerate the encryption of data for faster, more affordable data protection. Since the eMed Consulting Group deals with medical records, a high degree of security was paramount, and using Intel processors and chipsets made that goal much more efficiently achievable.

"Intel Xeon processors and Intel NICs, combined with our AES-NI technology, provide the performance, stability, and flexibility needed for a software-defined storage system," said Bev Crair, GM of the storage division at Intel Corp. "The zStax StorCore 104 combined with NexentaStor on top of Intel’s technology provides an innovative, open, and efficient way to store, manage, help secure, and retrieve data as important as medical records."
 
The zStax StorCore 104 provides storage for database, VMs, and backup functions with a single scalable storage appliance. It provides two Intel Xeon head nodes, and a 4U disk shelf with wear-resistant SAS SSDs to accelerate performance, 15K RPM HDDs to provide storage for database and VMs, and nearline SAS HDDs for backup. Another key feature, snapshot-based replication, provides asynchronous, bi-directional replication between the company’s established location and storage at its new sites across the country.
 
"The use of hybrid storage pools harnessing RAM, SSDs, and HDDs of different spindle speeds provides eMed the I/O performance they need for each storage tier without paying more than necessary for performance or power," said solutions manager Steve Scherer, Silicon Mechanics. "Leveraging software-defined storage architecture allowed eMed to grow its storage system from a simple read-optimized hybrid storage platform to an enterprise, highly available appliance, optimized for reads and writes. As their business needs grew, their architecture allowed them to scale performance and capacity dynamically."
 
As Vrona notes, databases don’t get smaller, so eMed expects to continually add storage as time goes by. They currently have two zStax systems, one dedicated to VMs and one dedicated to EMR databases. Slower and less expensive disk drives are used for backup, while the database side uses the SSDs for hybrid storage pooling, enabling them to achieve flash performance at the cost of spinning disks.

"We have been going through the process for the last few years and continue to upgrade the system to take advantage of new options," says Vrona.
 
The company also has plans to use the architecture as it expands from hosting data for practices that use Aprima PRM, into becoming a remote hosting resource for doctors and others using any EMR system.