Large hospital chain deploys 'MAID' storage

The new technology can cut backup time and costs

By Lucas Mearian

May 3, 2005 12:00 PM ET

Computerworld - To say that Baptist Memorial Health Care Corp.'s data storage needs are growing would be an understatement. In 2001, the hospital had 1.5TB of capacity on its storage-area network. By the end of its fiscal year this coming September, the Memphis-based health care organization expects to have 138TB on that same SAN. And it is projecting that its capacity needs will grow by five times over the next four years.
To deal with its storage needs, Baptist Memorial is migrating away from its four data tape silos to a relatively nascent technology known as a massive array of idle or independent disks (MAID). The move has cut backup times by 30% on average, reduced the amount of data center floor space needed to house its archives and cut power requirements.
Moving from tape to disk archival technology has also met the distributed business requirements of a health care organization that spans 62 facilities in three states. Like other such operations, Baptist Memorial -- which cares for more than 45,000 patients a year -- faces more stringent data protection guidelines under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, and it found that backing up 4.5TB of data in over 17 million files to tape was too slow and unreliable.
"Our radiologists, when they talk about having a CT scan study up on [display] screen, they want to see that first image in one second. There's no way tape or magnetic optical could do that," said Hal Weiss, a systems engineer for storage at Baptist Memorial.
Currently, there are two companies selling MAID storage: Longmont, Colo.-based start-up Copan Systems Inc. and Santa Clara, Calif.-based Exavio Inc.
Weiss purchased a Revolution 200T from Copan that has 256 serial ATA drives with 224TB of space at a cost of about $3,000 per terabyte. He installed the box in early December and had it online by midmonth.
"I was very surprised on how easy it was to set up. It was backing up data as virtual tape engine in 12 hours. It floored me on the performance. We have 1TB of e-mail exchange, when we were backing that up to physical tape, every night it took 6.5 hours. When we back it up to the MAID, it takes three hours," Weiss said.

The Copan box lists for $3,500 per terabyte. Generally, MAID capacity prices range from $3 to $5 per gigabyte, depending on the configuration, the amount of redundancy and total capacity, according to analysts. Copan's box can restore about 2.4TB of data per hour

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