When most people think about the need for scalable data storage, they think about traditional manufacturing or cloud computing. But there’s another industry that requires flexible solutions for storing data: the healthcare industry. Hospitals, small and large medical practices, and even healthcare records storage facilities all have an increasing need to access and share data. The challenge is that, until recently, there haven’t been many options available.
Whether for the sake of storing more digital x-rays or MRI results so that they can be easily shared between the radiologist’s facility and other healthcare providers or backing up patient files, data storage is critical. The selected system needs to be reliable. Similarly, the system needs to be able to support a variety of data types, development on and access by a variety of operating systems, and to function within a variety of server environments. Records need to be secure, and both structured and unstructured data must be supported. Finally, in order to keep costs down, IT departments are looking for highly efficient systems to use for data storage that are able to operate with peak of performance without being a power drain.
Healthcare IT needs to be consistently innovative in order to ensure that needs continue to be met. Do away with their existing storage assets or risking downtime in order to upgrade systems is not only wasteful but also creates the potential for system downtime. To prevent this, VAAI – vStorage APIs for Array Integration – is a consideration as it provides a unique interface that takes the complexity out of operating VMware infrastructure.
If you’re looking to improve on a healthcare data storage system, this is one reason to look to the Hitachi VSP – the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform – which has been certified for VAAI. Combined with the Hitachi Command Suite storage management tool, the VSP is able to leverage an organization’s existing industry standard storage devices. This is one of the three levels of scaling referenced when you read about the platform’s 3-D scaling – the ability to scale deep with multivendor storage. The other two dimensions are “up” – taking advantage of consolidating host servers – and scaling out to increase capacity.
By making it possible to continue using existing data storage environments and improving the way in which data is accessed, it’s possible to improve performance and drastically reduce costs – even in fields like healthcare where needs change frequently.
