Small storage vendor goes where Dell and EMC dare not tread

Storage Networking World - When it comes to storage, how much risk should companies be willing to take? When Outcome Sciences Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., went looking for a SAN to support high availability in its database, it was willing to venture into some unknown waters. After all, Fibre Channel would be new to the company, and it had selected Oracle 9i with Real Applications Clustering (RAC), a new, unproven technology.
But there were limits to how much risk the company was willing to accept. For instance, it didn't want to pay the cost of a SAN and then absorb all the losses if its new Oracle 9i RAC database didn't perform as expected.
Concerns about Oracle 9i RAC and SANs weren't unfounded. "We had read about companies that had problems with Oracle clusters," says Bob Collins, CTO at Outcome Sciences, a health care data management services firm. "We knew this was a risk, and we had real concerns."
The risk would have been easy to overcome, if the company's two main technology suppliers -- EMC and Dell -- were willing to cooperate. But it took a small company called Winchester Systems in Burlington, Mass., to step in and find a resolution.

Essential data
Outcome Sciences really couldn't afford to make a bad technology decision. The company offers an online set of Linux-based, browser-accessible applications that let pharmaceutical firms and hospitals track the latest treatment protocols and the likely patient outcomes. Another application lets Outcome Sciences' customers evaluate and track treatment performance against benchmarks.
At the heart of the Outcome Sciences system is a depository of clinical trial results and patient registries. It is this depository that the company migrated to Oracle 9i with RAC. Given the growth the company was seeing in the number of Phase IV trials and patient registries it maintained, plus the increasing number of customers accessing the data and its growing suite of applications, Collins decided his firm needed a SAN to allow multiple cluster nodes to access the depository.

"People are using this data for critical things," says Collins. "Some of the data are the actual care guidelines for individual patients, so it has to be available." Outcome Sciences already had set up multiple Web servers and load balancers to ensure that the online service was always available. Now the problem was ensuring the availability of the data and the database itself.

Making a simple problem more difficult
Outcome Sciences had been working with Dell, which proposed a small EMC system for the SAN component. "The price tag,