Hanover Hospital Deployed DataCore SANsymphony-V

DataCore Software Corporation announced that Hanover Hospital has realized continuous uptime with its HA software-defined storage and has reduced the time and effort it takes to provision storage and systems.

 
“The biggest benefit Hanover Hospital has experienced from adopting DataCore has been true HA due to the automatically synchronized virtual disks that are mirror protected and presented to different applications spanning our two on-campus datacenters,” stated Douglas Null, senior technical architect, MIS department, Hanover Hospital. “Each data center shares critical workloads – yet provides physical separation of storage and compute in the event of a localized data center outage. DataCore SANsymphony-V is our only storage solution and it delivers ‘no touch’ failover and failback operation. It delivers a fully automated process. Other vendor solutions are replicated as active/passive, need human intervention or scripts, or require other point products or special configurations to bring the passive site online.”
 
Within healthcare, IT is under pressure to increase storage capacity, improve resiliency and accelerate performance – all while managing costs. (DataCore’s infographic: Healthcare IT Storage Challenges) Hanover Hospital is one of more than 1,000 healthcare customers that have trusted DataCore to virtualize its storage infrastructure – thereby making its storage software-defined.
 
Overcoming Downtime, Data Growth and Slow Performance
Hanover reports that with SANsymphony-V deployed in a synchronous mirror configuration, it has realized continuous uptime through with its HA storage and has reduced the time it takes to provision storage and systems.

According to Null, “DataCore keeps both our users and patients happier because of high systems’ availability. Moreover, with DataCore we have been able to simplify management and reduce the TCO of the entire storage infrastructure.”  
 
Hanover originally started a number of years back with a single DataCore installation in one data center. Over the years, the hospital added synchronous mirroring that stretched storage availability between its two on-campus data centers. SANsymphony-V now serves as a unified storage services platform across the entire multi-site infrastructure. In particular, it is relied upon extensively for various mission-critical, enterprise and clinical applications. Examples of these include the hospital’s Healthcare BI reporting platforms, clinical middleware, medical dictation and transcription services, and Citrix XenApp, among others.   
 
Null adds: “We get very impressive performance and bandwidth throughput for the amount of VM servers and applications we are hosting on our environment. Plus, we have improved storage utilization since we are able to over-provision storage by about sixty%, meaning we are more efficient in our ability to meet the growth and cost demands for more capacity.“
 
Furthermore, the IT team wanted to deploy a Voice over IP telephony application and wanted the same ‘always up, always on’ capability. 

“After doing some research, what we came up with was to deploy DataCore – but in this instance use the product in another way altogether. In this case, Hanover deployed DataCore Virtual SAN, which used virtualized storage controllers inside of a VMware ESX host,” stated Null. “That solution had far fewer requirements than Virtual SAN from VMware.”
 
Hanover Hospital is an independent, not-for-profit community hospital and part of Hanover HealthCare PLUS network of services. It is located in Hanover, PA. It has approximately 1,400 staff and 93 beds across 15 buildings. Hanover manages 6,000 patient visits, 30,000 ER visits, 190,000 outpatient visits, 600,000 lab tests, 90,000 imaging scans, and over 600 births.