hanover attains ‘always on, always up’ availability

Hanover Hospital has attained continuous uptime with DataCore SANsymphony-V deployed in a synchronous mirror configuration that ensures data redundancy. What’s more, high-availability storage at Hanover has significantly reduced the time it takes to provision storage and systems. Bottom-line: Hanover Hospital has realized true continuous availability to its critical data with DataCore. The hospital has also drastically reduced the time spent on routine storage tasks and has reduced storage costs – all while increasing capacity utilization and increasing the performance of its applications.

“The biggest benefit Hanover Hospital has experienced from adopting DataCore has been true high availability due to the automatically synchronized virtual disks that are mirror-protected and presented to different applications spanning our two on-campus data centers,” stated Douglas Null, supervisor of technical support at 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 enormous pressure to increase storage capacity, improve resiliency and accelerate performance – all while managing costs. Hanover Hospital is one of more than 1,000 healthcare customers that have trusted DataCore to virtualize its storage infrastructure. DataCore’s adaptive, self-learning and healing technology takes the pain out of manual processes and helps deliver on the promise of the new software-defined data center through its hardware agnostic architecture.

Hanover Hospital is an independent, not-for-profit community hospital and part of Hanover HealthCare PLUS network of services. The hospital is located in Hanover, Pennsylvania. The hospital 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.

Hanover Hospital Hanover Attains ‘Always on, Always up’ Availability to Critical Data across Sites with DataCore SANsymphony-V Software-Defined Storage and Virtual SAN

ABOUT THE CUSTOMER Hanover Hospital is a not-for-profit community hospital which is part of a larger system called Hanover HealthCare PLUS Network, dedicated to the promotion of wellness, preservation of health, and the provision of diagnostic and therapeutic services to the people of the Greater Hanover, Pa. Area.

Hanover’s mission is to be the provider of choice for hospital supported acute care, diagnostic, therapeutic, rehabilitative and wellness services required to support its network of care. www.hanoverhospital.org

CASE STUDY - HEALTHCARE

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HANOVER’S DATACORE JOURNEY

Supervisor of Technical Support Douglas Null reports that from a performance and applications perspective, he has seen a lot of improvement over years as far as base features go with DataCore solutions. The results attained with DataCore are impressive:

AVAILABILITY

● No downtime for last 4 years despite storage failures and outages

PERFORMANCE

● 1K IOPS from SATA drives with DataCore

CAPACITY

● 60% overprovisioned

OPERATIONAL SIMPLICITY

● Provisioning went from 4 hours to 5 minutes

COSTS

● 90% less in CAPEX

● 80-90% less in OPEX

Douglas Null is charged with providing technical leadership for the IT infrastructure, including servers, storage, networking, security, as well as technology and application conversion. Hanover started with a single DataCore installation in one data center about six years ago. Over the years, the hospital added synchronous mirroring that stretched storage availability between its two on-campus data centers.

The two data centers are connected by dark fiber. Roughly 90% of the infrastructure is run on VMware vSphere. The majority of the “compute” is done on 34 HP DL380 servers. On these servers, the hospital has approximately 266 virtual machines (VMs) running. Hanover is using EMC and HP MSA arrays as its current storage platforms, with the HP MSA’s used specifically to support the DataCore deployment.

DataCore 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, clinical and enterprise applications. Examples of these include the components of the hospital’s MEDITECH EMR, clinical middleware, medical dictation and transcription services, components of an Ambulatory HIS, a Medisolv BI reporting platform, Citrix XenApp, Infrastructure Management and Monitoring Applications, multiple Microsoft product offerings such as Microsoft SQL and MySQL, as well as other applications.

Significantly, when the IT team at Hanover breaks down the technology that is running on the EMC storage versus the technology running the VM’s that run on the DataCore virtualized storage platform back-ended by HP MSA, of the 266 total VMs, 140 are now running on the DataCore software-defined storage platform. “Well over half of our environment is running on DataCore-powered storage,” explained Null.

Hardware’s Shortcomings: Challenges of Doing Things the Old Way

Prior to DataCore, the IT team at Hanover faced numerous challenges with the incumbent storage vendor. For one, a situation arose where several new departmental applications needed to be deployed quickly. These new applications required a significant storage footprint not available in the incumbent storage system. Whereas expansion using its incumbent vendor was considered, this was not a viable option due to high costs as well as worries as to whether performance could scale with a hardware SAN. Particularly as new applications were added, could IOPS support the load?

With the requirement Hanover had for the new applications, the IT team needed to be able to quickly scale the storage solution and the applications that resided on that storage solution far more efficiently than they had been able to do so in the past. “If we had gone down the existing path we were on with our traditional SAN, it would have been a very lengthy process to acquire the storage and to deploy the storage to ESX servers in the environment,” stated Null.

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“[With DataCore] 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 percent, meaning we are more efficient in our ability to meet the growth and cost demands for more capacity.”

- Douglas Null Head of IT Infrastructure Hanover Hospital

A second business driver for Hanover was that it sought to better utilize its second on-campus data center. A goal was to make the second data center available in an “active-active” manner. The site was a warm site used primarily for failover and a lot of human intervention was required to perform failovers. SAN expansion from its incumbent vendor would have meant that Hanover could have only embraced an “active-passive” model. This was not ideal for a healthcare deployment. Moreover, the replication that was needed using the incumbent systems between the sites would require two identical arrays and the added site recovery manager (SRM) product which was a requirement would have made it more costly and a very cumbersome process.

“The active-passive model was not for us,” added Null. “The requirement that you take a site down in order to use resources in the other, inactive or ‘warm’ data center was something we felt was not the best scenario.”

Becoming Software-Defined with DataCore: Eliminating Downtime, Increasing Performance and Managing Data Growth

Hanover Hospital did not want to spend a lot of money by going down the same old path of deploying new applications on a replicated, traditional two-array SAN configuration.

“We wanted something we could quickly scale,” stated Null. “Additionally, we did not necessarily want flash storage if we did not need flash storage.”

Today, Hanover Hospital is – according to Null – “a happy DataCore customer.” With DataCore SANsymphony-V now in its 10th generation. Hanover reports that with DataCore SANsymphony-V deployed in a synchronous mirror configuration, it has realized continuous uptime through with its high-availability storage and has significantly reduced the time it takes to provision storage and systems.

The hospital is using the active-active design between its data centers, with nine hosts connected to the active-active arrays. According to Null, “Hanover has not experienced any downtime due to DataCore in the last four years. DataCore keeps both our users and patients happier because of high system availability. Moreover, with DataCore we have been able to simplify management and reduce the total cost of ownership of the entire storage infrastructure.”

Additionally, Hanover has seen good performance from its DataCore platform. In fact in one instance where a RAID 5 virtual volume was mirrored between the two sites, the IT team was particularly impressed. Hanover was at the time using VMware ESX 5. Hanover used a tool from Veeam to enable Hanover’s IT team to monitor the VM disk metrics of a VM running on the DataCore platform. It was noticed by all that the particular application was taking well over 1,000 IOPS/second on the DataCore-powered storage, however, the latency on the data stored was “nil” and the reads were never even hitting the backend physical disk because of the DRAM caching that is part and parcel of the DataCore SANsymphony-V.

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”The biggest benefit Hanover Hospital has experienced from adopting DataCore has been true high availability due to the automatically synchronized virtual disks that are mirror-protected and presented to different applications spanning our two on-campus data centers, Each data center shares critical workloads, yet provides physical separation of storage and compute in the event of a localized data center outage. 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. “

- Douglas Null Head of IT Infrastructure Hanover Hospital

Null added, “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 percent, meaning we are more efficient in our ability to meet the growth and cost demands for more capacity.”

Another significant benefit for Hanover has been the ability to better manage capacity through thin-provisioning. According to Null, the IT environment at Hanover is about 60% overprovisioned. This benefits the organization by allowing it to not have to add new storage when new systems come online. Existing storage can be allocated to new systems immediately and overall storage can be expanded down the road. When new systems are introduced, the IT team simply thin-provisions virtual volumes of storage and presents them to the ESX hosts as well as to the VMs. By doing so, Hanover saves both time and money.

Operational Simplicity Leads to New Uses for DataCore Platform – Like IP Telephony

One of the other benefits of software-defined storage with DataCore that has significantly helped Hanover Hospital has been the overall operational simplicity of storage management that is made possible by the storage virtualization software. Provisioning a DataCore environment is truly straightforward and is, according to Null, “essentially a two-step process.” With the underlying disk pools already built, if someone on the IT team wants to create a virtual volume that both of the data centers’ VMware ESX hosts can see, then the user first creates the virtual volume and then defines that it is mirrored. Instantly, that data shows up in both on-campus data centers where both ESX hosts can connect to it and all VMs can use that virtual storage.

This software-defined approach took provisioning from four hours down to five minutes. This is because DataCore SANsymphony-V excels in automating storage-related tasks – whereas the steps needed to provision storage in a way other than the DataCore way are simply daunting.

TOP 3 REASONS FOR SELECTING DATACORE

For additional information, please visit www.datacore.com or email [email protected] © 2015 DataCore Software Corporation. All Rights Reserved. DataCore, the DataCore logo and SANsymphony are trademarks or registered trademarks of DataCore Software Corporation. All other products, services and company names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

ABOUT DATACORE

DataCore is a leader in software-defined storage. The company’s storage virtualization and Virtual SAN solutions empower organizations to seamlessly manage and scale their data storage architectures, delivering massive performance gains at a fraction of the cost of solutions offered by legacy storage hardware vendors. Backed by 10,000 customer sites around the world, DataCore’s adaptive and self-learning and healing technology takes the pain out of manual processes and helps deliver on the promise of the new software defined data center through its hardware agnostic architecture.

www.datacore.com

With a traditional SAN set in an active-active configuration, Null and others at Hanover would be tasked with configuring an equipment storage solution on one side, then configuring the equipment storage solution on the other side. Then, they would have to configure the replication between the two sites. They would also have to configure journals and logs. Finally, they would need to configure Site Recovery Manager (SRM) from VMware that is used to failover the VMs from site to site.

“As you can see, we save a lot of time in even the most simple configuration by provisioning storage in both of our data centers with DataCore,” Null emphasized.

Because Hanover Hospital has been a DataCore customer for a number of years, it has become comfortable throwing new projects onto the DataCore unified storage services platform. A case in point is the new voice over IP (VOIP) initiative where Hanover is transitioning down the Avaya-Nortel path for its IP telephony structure. To do this required 12 different VMs, which Hanover wanted to be highly available to meet service-level agreements (SLAs). In short, the IT team wanted this telephony application and the servers that supported it to be just like any other clinical system Hanover has – “always up, always on.”

The goal was to make IP telephony just as reliable as its other tier-1 applications and to meet the same standard of resiliency in the data centers that the organization has grown accustomed to with the DataCore synchronous mirrors. Key requirements for this project were two-fold. First, the hospital needed reliable performance as voice communication is a tier-1 application. Second, the initiative required both physical storage and a compute footprint spanning both hospital data centers.

The solution Hanover embraced was one consisting of a new VMware ESX cluster that utilizes DataCore SANsymphony-V virtualized storage controllers serving internal HP storage. With this in place, performance and availability SLAs have all been met.

“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.”

Two DataCore Virtual SAN hosts provide all the resiliency Hanover needs for its IP telephony application.

“If one of our data centers became out of service, we still wanted to have full functionality from the VOIP solution available from the second data center,” summarized Null. “And we get that with DataCore Virtual SAN. We can lose our single host on the primary data center side, and still have the 12 VMs that are running in that environment running on the secondary data center side seamlessly.”

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hanover attains ‘always on, always up’ availability

Healthcare