Scale Computing

Scale Computing for Healthcare

Healthcare generates excessive amounts of data: medical records, images, hospital administration, and insurance documents to name just a few. In addition to extreme data growth, regulations like HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley mandate highly protected and highly available data. Couple these pressing needs with the cost of highly available and high-performance networked storage, and you have an overwhelming burden for IT and IT budgets in the healthcare industry.

Scale Computing steps in with Intelligent Clustered Storage™ (ICS) — highly scalable, highly available, and redundant grid storage for the healthcare industry. Scale’s powerful yet affordable software creates next-generation grids for healthcare’s extreme data and protection needs. ICS’ clustered architecture functions as an independently controlled mass data storage device. Storage nodes can act as a SAN, NAS or both, and cluster to form a high-performance grid-based storage system. Data protection works at the block-level for high-speed replication of even the largest image files. And all of this power and scalability comes with a low price tag because it uses commodity hardware.

Use Case	Organization
Virtual Desktops
PACS
Virtualization	La Familia Healthcare
Virtualization
Archiving and Virtualization

Scale ICS Benefits for Healthcare

• Powerful scalability. Extreme data growth and long data retention requirements characterize healthcare. ICS clustered architecture enables IT to non-disruptively add new nodes at will, which seamlessly increases the capacity of the entire array. Customers can easily and cost-effectively grow their ICS storage system from a few terabytes to over 2 petabytes.
• High availability. ICS serves healthcare’s high availability and security needs with data protection and redundant infrastructure. The storage system does not require expensive RAID technology because it mirrors, snapshots, and replicates within its node architecture. Each node is capable of replication and re-replicating as needed without the overhead or risk of a master node.
• Security and compliance. Mirroring, snapshots, and advanced replication keep the ICS storage grid fully redundant and highly secure. This is particularly important for healthcare data storage, which must prevent data loss and corruption at all costs.

Scale Computing and Healthcare

Healthcare IT departments face very difficult challenges. First, healthcare generates extreme data in terms of sheer file size and growing volumes of data. Second, healthcare data is heavily regulated so IT must be certain that critical data is highly protected and highly available at all times.

For example, a diagnostic technology called Multislice Computed Tomography enables exceptionally granular brain scans. But a single CT exam – just one – easily generates 1 gigabyte (GB) of storage. Multiply that by 1GB per patient, and IT is looking at some serious capacity needs for just one diagnostic tool. Add digital imaging, scanned X-rays, and 3-D models and you have overwhelming storage provisioning needs just for diagnostic data. Add to that large image files, medical records, case management records, hospital data, and insurance documents, and you have some extreme storage needs. On top of these capacity and performance issues, regulations like HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley require that all of this data be highly protected and highly available.

These scenarios can quickly overwhelm IT’s resources and become nightmares for traditional storage systems. Investing in enterprise-class storage systems comes with high prices and ongoing maintenance costs. And even with all of this high-end storage, IT struggles to gain performance and provisioning control over the storage infrastructure.

Scale Computing Heals Healthcare

Scale Computing steps into this demanding situation with Intelligent Clustered Storage (ICS). ICS is an extremely high performance but low-cost storage system that ideally suits healthcare’s storage challenges.

Scale’s powerful and highly affordable software runs on commodity hardware. Its architecture allows it to offer third generation storage clusters for healthcare’s extreme storage needs – and at an exceptionally affordable price.

The 3Cs of Storage: Cost, Control, Convenience

Traditional Systems	Scale Computing
Cost
High capital expenses (CAPEX) and operating expenses (OPEX) strain healthcare IT budgets to the breaking point.	Supercomputing software runs on commodity hardware for very low CAPEX, and streamlined management dramatically lowers OPEX.
Control
IT must choose between NAS and SAN on a single storage system, and are forced to over-provision to control rampant data growth.	Scale enables NAS or SAN in the same ICS system at the same time. Smooth scalability grants IT extreme control of the storage environment.
Convenience
Command-line interface (CLI) takes time and is prone to manual error. IT must balance cluster densities and scalability is awkward or non-existent.	Simple but powerful GUI replaces time-consuming CLI. IT can mix and match node densities, and ICS scales smoothly on capacity, performance and throughput.

 

ICS’ clustered architecture functions as an independently controlled mass data storage device. Storage nodes can act as a SAN, NAS or both, and the nodes cluster to form a high performance grid-based storage system. Mirroring, snapshots and replication are native to the ICS and data protection works at the block-level to protect even the largest healthcare image files. And all of this enterprise power and scalability comes with an extremely affordable price.

Scale Benefits Healthcare

• Powerful but simplified administration. Simplified storage management is a necessity for relieving heavy storage management overhead. Administrators may operate the ICS management console from any node for control and flexibility. The streamlined GUI interface simplifies management tasks across the entire cluster.
• Smooth scalability of capacity, performance and throughput. Healthcare is characterized by excessive data growth and long data retention requirements. ICS clustered architecture lets IT easily add new nodes at will without downing the system or migrating data to the new node. Since storage processing is active-active, data never stalls at the storage controller level and both performance and throughput scale along with capacity. Customers can easily and cost-effectively grow their ICS storage system from as little as 3 useable terabytes to more than 2 useable petabytes.
• Highly available with no single point of failure. Scale ICS complies with HIPAA regulations regarding data availability for disaster recovery and business continuity. Scale’s high availability features are extremely cost-effective because they do not require expensive RAID technology. ICS natively mirrors, snapshots, and replicates within its own architecture. Each node is capable of replicating and re-replicating without the management overhead of a master node. And no master node means there is no single point of failure.
• Fast performance and throughput. Scale can handle demanding healthcare data including very large files and high volumes of smaller files. ICS allows multiple storage protocols like CIFS, NFS and iSCSI to run at the same time, effectively turning the storage system into a SAN and a NAS. This enables storage administrators to assign the optimum storage type to incoming data such as block-based storage for large digital X-rays and file-based storage for frequently accessed hospital records. Growing data volumes do not impact performance or throughput since these characteristics scale with additional nodes.