The change has affected us all: As communications, documents, images, sound and video have gone digital, our need for data storage has skyrocketed – from megabytes to gigabytes, and now to terabytes. Some of the data can just be archived; some needs to be at our fingertips.
For U.S. hospitals, relative late-comers to the digital era, the shock has been even greater. Electronic medical records and digital imaging, especially, have forced huge, new technology investments in the last few years, while strict privacy laws require extra-delicate data handling.
Andy Fuss, lead technology engineer at Roger Williams Medical Center, explains how he’s tackled the triple challenge of data storage, backup and disaster recovery.
PBN: What kind of data volume are you dealing with?
FUSS: The data growth has been an explosion. I would say it was maybe 2 terabytes about five years ago, to now being closer to 20 TB. … We employ a few different technologies in our data management and data protection, so we have some data that goes straight to archive – for example, data that we capture from X-rays, scanned images of patient records, all those electronic support records that you need for the hospital business. That is data that will never be modified and will be an internal record to the facility – and that data flows to a device made by EMC called the Centera. [The rest of the data, including active patient records, e-mail, etc., needs to be accessible on demand and is handled separately.]
Over the last two months, we’ve gone from 3.9TB to 4.2TB, so about 300 gigabytes of floating online storage, along with probably close to 500GB of unchangeable storage. It’s a fairly big number, and it only grows.
Rhode Island's Market Has Changed. Developers, Builders, Investors and Sellers Must Change With It.
By Emilio DiSpirito IV License Partner | Engel & Völkers Oceanside Leader | The DiSpirito…
Learn More
PBN: How has the adoption of electronic medical records affected your need for storage?
FUSS: That definitely lights up the storage requirements, because now you’re keeping the record online, always available, and it lights up the need for support services, so people can get to that record from more than one place. … It used to be one physical chart at the end of the bed; now we can provide access for the treating physician and help them to better treat their patients. … EMRs have been a huge success story for Roger Williams. … But we have seen the drive from the use of the system far exceed the initial capacity that we were thinking of, and that pushes us to apply the different data protection strategies so all this data remains online.
PBN: How do you find the best data storage and backup vendors for your needs, and the best value?
PBN: How did you deal with the next step, storage and backup systems?
FUSS: Previous approaches had involved backing up to tape, which worked when it was 500GB or 1TB of information. But as time moves along and the demand for storage and backup increased, we could no longer back up all our data within a 24-hour period, so we were no longer adequately protecting our data. So we went out on a vendor search and we chose Data Domain Inc. [of Santa Clara, Calif.] as our backup to disc and data de-duplication service.
PBN: How does that work?
FUSS: Those are physical boxes that we have, one here in Rhode Island and another in Springfield. The two are connected over that hard wire, and they back up 24 hours a day; they’re never more than 5 minutes behind each other. With this de-duplication of data, it allows us to compress the data, so we can send it out and back it up quickly. So now we have backups in much shorter amounts of time, much more comprehensive, and it’s protected 100 miles from here. And then on top of that, we have the EMC Centera for read-once data. That’s data that is needed to treat patients and has to be accessible in real time, and it backs up by itself here and then replicates it in real time in Springfield.
PBN: Do you still have more work to do?
FUSS: We are seeking funding to increase our disaster recovery capabilities, and having the necessary equipment in Springfield “hot” or immediately accessible so we can stream that data back to Rhode Island anytime. … We’re very happy with how far we’ve come with it. Talking with other facilities across the country, we seem to be well in line or slightly ahead of the curve with the work our peers are doing.
PBN: Do you feel that with these technologies, you’re going to be able to keep a handle on your technology costs?
FUSS: We definitely can keep a handle on it with these technologies. We have stayed ahead of the curve and are still maintaining our backup times, our compression rates are still extremely high, the Centera was a phenomenal add-in on top of the Data Domain. We put these pieces together and we came up with a really nice solution, so our board and our management have been very supportive and have seen the value and the improvement we’ve made. •
