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.

1. 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 andVirtual SAN
ABOUTTHE 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

2. 2
CASE STUDY - HEALTHCARE
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 onVMware 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 theVM’s that run on the
DataCore virtualized storage platform back-ended by HP MSA, of the 266 totalVMs,
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 DoingThings the OldWay
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.

3. 3
CASE STUDY - HEALTHCARE
“[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 usingVMware
ESX 5. Hanover used a tool fromVeeam to enable Hanover’s IT team to monitor the
VM disk metrics of aVM 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.

4. 4
CASE STUDY - HEALTHCARE
”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 ofVM 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 theVMs.
By doing so, Hanover saves both time and money.
Operational Simplicity Leads to New Uses for DataCore Platform –
Like IPTelephony
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 allVMs 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

5. For additional information, please visit www.datacore.com or email info@datacore.com
© 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)
fromVMware that is used to failover theVMs 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 differentVMs, 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 newVMware 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
DataCoreVirtual SAN, which used virtualized storage controllers inside of aVMware
ESX host,” stated Null. “That solution had far fewer requirements thanVirtual SAN
fromVMware.”
Two DataCoreVirtual 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 theVOIP solution available from the second data center,”
summarized Null. “And we get that with DataCoreVirtual SAN.We can lose our single
host on the primary data center side, and still have the 12VMs that are running in that
environment running on the secondary data center side seamlessly.”
0515
CASE STUDY - HEALTHCARE