IBM Systems and TechnologySolution Brief

Healthcare

Enabling essential capabilities with IBM Smarter Storage Adopt a strategic approach to storage for greater healthcare insights and value

Highlights●● ● ●Manage cost and capacity without com-

promising performance and quality of service

●● ● ●Apply big data capabilities for real-time insights from new forms of information

●● ● ●Deploy robust clouds for increased agility and health information access

Healthcare industry transformation is happening now. Data volume and diversity are growing exponentially. Collecting, analyzing, storing, sharing and moving large amounts of data securely will require a smarter approach to data and storage management.

Healthcare organizations will increasingly consume structured and unstructured data in volumes and at speeds not seen before. They will expect information to be available instantly to support collaboration and faster decision making at the time and place of care or interaction. Proficiency in information capture, integration, secure access and management will become essential to redefining what value and success mean for organizations, their patients and stakeholders.

IBM Smarter Storage for Smarter Computing is a more intelligent, efficient and automated approach to the design and deployment of stor-age systems. It helps organizations to gain valuable, timely insights from their data and greater efficiencies and performance from their enterprise technology—and do so for less cost—by leveraging self-optimizing systems, built-in efficiency and cloud technologies.

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Solution BriefHealthcareIBM Systems and Technology

The IBM approach delivers solutions that are:

●● ● Efficient by design: System management is intuitive and easy. With tightly integrated technologies, data consumes less space.

●● ● Self-optimizing: By analyzing data access patterns, IBM storage solutions can automatically adapt to improve performance while balancing cost.

●● ● Cloud agile: Anywhere, anytime data availability makes storage an enabler of transformation, even as it improves return on investment.

Manage cost and capacity without compromising performance and serviceMany healthcare organizations are challenged by resource shortages, data growth and budget constraints. Digital health records and data retention mandates have increased the need

for storage and storage management. Storage costs have risen rapidly, with corresponding pressures on data center space and cooling requirements for storage deployment and maintenance. Administrators often find it difficult to manage constantly changing data environments, meet regulatory requirements for information availability or measure storage utilization. Expectations for improved service quality without budget increases are common. Supporting compliance with regulations is a clear priority as sensitive information is shared within and across organizations.

IBM Smarter Storage is efficient by designTo address the challenges of storage optimization, built-in efficiency technologies can help reduce capital and operating expenses and manage storage growth using a holistic approach. With IBM Smarter Storage, organizations can:

●● ● Maximize storage utilization: Decrease storage space requirements with little manual intervention by the IT staff. Take advantage of built-in storage efficiency technologies that can save up to 47 percent in administrator time and reduce complexity by up to 30 percent.1

●● ● Simplify storage management: Deploy new storage capac-ity and applications more rapidly, increasing service quality. Automatically provision storage with the functionality and performance attributes required by the application.

●● ● Help safeguard data security and patient confidentiality: Use built-in encryption capabilities at minimal cost. Simplify technical policies and procedures that enable information access, audit and integrity controls.

IBM Smarter Storage for Smarter Computing

Manage cost andcapacity growth

Efficientby design

Self-optimizing

Cloudagile

Improveperformance

and productivity

Increaseinformationaccess andimprove ROI

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Solution BriefHealthcareIBM Systems and Technology

●● ● Predictably grow the storage infrastructure: Better manage the storage infrastructure to manage storage and storage budget growth. Redirect resources to other health-care initiatives with help from IBM.

With IBM Smarter Storage, efficiency features are built in, ready to deploy and operate consistently to decrease space requirements, simplify administration and improve efficiency for active workloads. Technologies such as space-saving dedu-plication and IBM® Real-Time Compression™, a patented IBM technology that works on active primary data to reduce space requirements up to 80 percent, mean data analytics run faster because less data is stored.

IBM Smarter Storage is also cost-efficient; storing less means buying less storage capacity. And an intuitive, integrated and advanced common management interface is staff-efficient—with the capability to manage pools of resources from one location, administering multiple storage systems can take only about half the time as with competing products.1

IBM Smarter Storage solutions can break the time-consuming cycle of manually predicting IT demand, provisioning storage and migrating data to balance performance and cost—freeing IT professionals for other tasks. The ability to automatically place information in a tiered infrastructure where it is cost-effectively stored according to its importance provides a level of responsiveness that is ideally suited to healthcare environments. Policy-based automated backup and recovery can help align disaster recovery priorities with recovery center capabilities to protect data and support regulatory compliance.

A large university medical center realized cost savings of more than USD160 million, enabling the organization to invest in life-saving healthcare innovations.

Apply big data capabilities for real-time insights from new forms of informationAs organizations increase focus on wellness and prevention, they are implementing multi-channel patient engagement strat-egies enabled by advanced analytics to help deliver better care. Proactive care models involve delivering the most complete data to the point of decision for more effective collaboration and more personalized care. Through real-time communica-tions and information sharing, patients gain better access to care and increased convenience, whether mobile or in a care facility. Managing large volumes of structured and unstructured data securely and meeting expectations for real-time access to information are key challenges.

Ensuring performance and adapting as data needs evolve are fundamental to success. A recent IBM study predicted that by 2015, some 80 percent of the world’s data will be “uncertain”—unstructured and unreliable data often derived from social business technologies—and will require new management techniques.2 Organizations with highly efficient data centers are already learning how to deal with this; the most successful implement four to six times more storage optimization techniques than others.3

IBM Smarter Storage is self-optimizingBuilt-in technologies can optimize performance and cost, increase productivity, and virtualize more of the infrastructure so that organizations can:

●● ● Properly size storage deployments: IBM Smarter Storage includes solutions that can automatically migrate the most active data to solid-state drives (SSDs), maximizing perfor-mance and taking full advantage of advanced disk technolo-gies—helping avoid over-provisioning the storage environment for peak workloads.

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Solution BriefHealthcareIBM Systems and Technology

●● ● Automate performance-tuning management: Healthcare’s often inf lexible IT architectures are a thing of the past with IBM Smarter Storage, which continually analyzes data access patterns and automatically moves data to the most appropri-ate tier of storage. It can also simplify the movement of data within and between storage systems—a key capability for organizations that in the future will need to automatically synchronize data between healthcare facilities to reduce the risk of patient information loss or unavailability.

●● ● More easily grow the virtual server infrastructure: IBM Smarter Storage automatically optimizes data through-put across an infrastructure so healthcare organizations can get the most value from their increasingly diverse data, as well as their servers and storage.

●● ● Protect patient information against unauthorized access using built-in encryption capabilities at minimal cost: IBM Smarter Storage can help simplify the technical policies and procedures that enable information access, audit and integrity controls.

IBM Smarter Storage is optimized for rapidly growing informa-tion management workloads, helping to make analytics and business intelligence more effective and affordable. With its continuous monitoring, built-in analytics, pattern recognition and smart data placement technologies, IBM Smarter Storage can improve the performance and efficiency of applications that use big data. IBM Easy Tier® runs automatically and can deliver up to a three times performance improvement. The consistent high performance of IBM XIV® Storage for all applications, coupled with the system’s zero tuning and pain-free provisioning and its integration with cloud and servicemanagement systems, is due to its “out-of-the-box” optimiza-tion. And tiered storage optimization technologies move volumes of data based on policies set by administrators.

An academic health center virtualized its IT environment enabling anytime, anywhere access to clinical applications and patient information, helping to improve practitioner productivity and decision making.

Deploy robust clouds for increased agility and health information accessInformation-rich, patient-centered care models are primed to benefit from cloud computing. Cloud-delivered services enabled by open standards can support cooperation, collabora-tive workflows and information sharing. Ultimately the shift to these new work environments will facilitate continual improve-ment and real-time exchange of ideas—whether by the patient managing his or her own health or by providers communicating with patients or collaborating with other professionals— ultimately leading to better care. Stakeholders will be able to connect to each other and respond to changing needs and the latest medical breakthroughs almost as they happen.

Emerging collaborative partnerships and dynamic care delivery networks will require the ability to effortlessly deliver the most complete information, keep up with new demand and make change happen—error-free. Agility is important. And clouds are all about agility. They can deliver health services whenever those services are required—whether at the provider facility or the patient or consumer location—to meet high service levels at an affordable cost.

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Solution BriefHealthcareIBM Systems and Technology

IBM Smarter Storage is cloud agileIBM Smarter Storage can simplify adoption of cloud computing so organizations can more rapidly deliver services and realize the benefits of healthcare innovation initiatives. Cloud-agile IBM solutions can help facilitate collaborative partnerships by supporting virtualized and cloud environments that can:

●● ● Maximize storage utilization: IBM Smarter Storage adapts easily to unpredictable workloads to support the dynamic data needs of healthcare stakeholders. Its technologies can automatically synchronize data between facilities in a care delivery network so data can f low to providers and other stakeholders anywhere, anytime.

●● ● Automate cloud management: Automated, self-service portals will allow cloud-based applications to easily access the information they need—whenever they need it, with no delays. Automated and self-service functions help drive down the IT costs of provisioning and deployment. With policy-based data management, information moves to users automatically and securely without manual intervention, sim-plifying and ensuring digital health information transmission. Not only can these built-in tools simplify patient information transmission security measures through policy and applica-tion awareness, they can help organizations to better respond to compliance reporting using cloud-based automation for backup and archiving.

●● ● Enable robust cloud expansion: With IBM Smarter Storage, administrators can deploy clouds faster and manage significantly more capacity than otherwise possible, providing the elasticity to proactively and efficiently provision capacity for dynamic consumer workloads. IBM Smarter Storage can also take advantage of storage virtualization to maximize storage already deployed in the organization—including non-IBM systems—reducing new storage purchases.

Cloud approaches offer the opportunity to expand IT capacity quickly without large capital investments. A modest 100-bed hospital will generate approximately 60 GB of new digital con-tent per bed per year, requiring at least an additional 6 TB of storage space annually. Cloud-delivered IT resources can help address the need for economical storage expansion, eliminating the need to continue buying and supporting in-house storage systems, lowering costs and helping with storage management.

Healthcare organizations will analyze growing volumes and increasingly more complex information. Being cloud agile means storage systems can move data where it can be used most effectively, whether in the cloud or in a data center.

A world leader in medical supplies reduced application response times by 30 percent, allowing staff to be more responsive to customer demands.

Why IBM?As healthcare organizations work to redefine value and success for their patients and stakeholders, they need to build the IT capabilities that will be essential to healthcare transformation. These capabilities need to f lexibly and economically keep pace with new clinical and business requirements and technology evolution, while becoming a competitive tool for healthcare innovation.

IBM combines decades of storage technology excellence, experience and expertise with healthcare industry knowledge and partnerships to help organizations unlock the value of their data with analytics, gain storage efficiencies and spend more of their IT budget on innovation initiatives and less on

maintaining current environments. Our experts can help assess your storage and data management environments, bringing a holistic perspective to identify savings potential and build IT strategies that support current and future requirements.

IBM and our Business Partners bring a complete set of services, software, storage and systems technologies to help reduce the complexity and costs of your storage infrastructure and prepare for future healthcare environments. Taking advantage of these capabilities and applying leading practices can help you to grow the value of your data, increase service levels and reduce IT costs.

For more informationTo learn more about IBM Smarter Storage, please contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit: ibm.com/systems/storage

Additionally, IBM Global Financing can help you acquire the IT solutions that your business needs in the most cost-effective and strategic way possible. We’ll partner with credit-qualified clients to customize an IT financing solution to suit your busi-ness goals, enable effective cash management, and improve your total cost of ownership. IBM Global Financing is your smartest choice to fund critical IT investments and propel your business forward. For more information, visit: ibm.com/financing

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Produced in the United States of America September 2012

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This document is current as of the initial date of publication and may be changed by IBM at any time. Not all offerings are available in every country in which IBM operates.

The performance data discussed herein is presented as derived under specific operating conditions. Actual results may vary.

THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED “AS IS” WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT ANY WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND ANY WARRANTY OR CONDITION OF NON-INFRINGEMENT. IBM products are warranted according to the terms and conditions of the agreements under which they are provided.

Actual available storage capacity may be reported for both uncompressed and compressed data and will vary and may be less than stated.

The client is responsible for ensuring compliance with laws and regulations applicable to it. IBM does not provide legal advice or represent or warrant that its services or products will ensure that the client is in compliance with any law or regulation.

1 Edison Group, “Competitive Management Cost Study: IBM Storwize V7000 vs. EMC VNX5500 Storage Systems,” April 2012. Retrieved May 31, 2012, from http://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/en/tsw03132usen/TSW03132USEN.PDF

2 IBM Research, “IBM Global Technology Outlook, 2012,” http://www.zurich.ibm.com/pdf/isl/infoportal/GTO_2012_Booklet.pdf

3 IBM Corporation, “2012 IBM Global Data Center Study,” http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/en/it-services/ data-center-efficiency-study.html

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