Enabling essential capabilities with IBM Smarter Storage

1. IBM Systems and Technology
Solution Brief
Healthcare
Enabling essential
capabilities with
IBM Smarter Storage
Adopt a strategic approach to storage for greater
healthcare insights and value
Highlights
●● ● ●
Manage cost and capacity without com-
promising performance and quality of
service
●● ● ●
Apply big data capabilities for real-time
insights from new forms of information
●● ● ●
Deploy robust clouds for increased agility
and health information access
Healthcare industry transformation is happening now. Data volume
and diversity are growing exponentially. Collecting, analyzing, storing,
sharing and moving large amounts of data securely will require a smarter
approach to data and storage management.
Healthcare organizations will increasingly consume structured and
unstructured data in volumes and at speeds not seen before. They will
expect information to be available instantly to support collaboration
and faster decision making at the time and place of care or interaction.
Proficiency in information capture, integration, secure access and
management will become essential to redefining what value and
success mean for organizations, their patients and stakeholders.
IBM Smarter Storage for Smarter Computing is a more intelligent,
efficient and automated approach to the design and deployment of stor-
age systems. It helps organizations to gain valuable, timely insights from
their data and greater efficiencies and performance from their enterprise
technology—and do so for less cost—by leveraging self-optimizing
systems, built-in efficiency and cloud technologies.

2. 2
Solution Brief
HealthcareIBM Systems and Technology
The IBM approach delivers solutions that are:
●● ●
Efficient by design: System management is intuitive and
easy. With tightly integrated technologies, data consumes
less space.
●● ●
Self-optimizing: By analyzing data access patterns,
IBM storage solutions can automatically adapt to improve
performance while balancing cost.
●● ●
Cloud agile: Anywhere, anytime data availability makes
storage an enabler of transformation, even as it improves
return on investment.
Manage cost and capacity without
compromising performance and service
Many healthcare organizations are challenged by resource
shortages, data growth and budget constraints. Digital health
records and data retention mandates have increased the need
for storage and storage management. Storage costs have risen
rapidly, with corresponding pressures on data center space and
cooling requirements for storage deployment and maintenance.
Administrators often find it difficult to manage constantly
changing data environments, meet regulatory requirements
for information availability or measure storage utilization.
Expectations for improved service quality without budget
increases are common. Supporting compliance with regulations
is a clear priority as sensitive information is shared within and
across organizations.
IBM Smarter Storage is efficient by design
To address the challenges of storage optimization, built-in
efficiency technologies can help reduce capital and operating
expenses and manage storage growth using a holistic approach.
With IBM Smarter Storage, organizations can:
●● ●
Maximize storage utilization: Decrease storage space
requirements with little manual intervention by the IT staff.
Take advantage of built-in storage efficiency technologies
that can save up to 47 percent in administrator time and
reduce complexity by up to 30 percent.1
●● ●
Simplify storage management: Deploy new storage capac-
ity and applications more rapidly, increasing service quality.
Automatically provision storage with the functionality and
performance attributes required by the application.
●● ●
Help safeguard data security and patient confidentiality:
Use built-in encryption capabilities at minimal cost. Simplify
technical policies and procedures that enable information
access, audit and integrity controls.
IBM Smarter Storage for Smarter Computing
Manage cost and
capacity growth
Efficient
by design
Self-
optimizing
Cloud
agile
Improve
performance
and productivity
Increase
information
access and
improve ROI

3. 3
Solution Brief
HealthcareIBM Systems and Technology
●● ●
Predictably grow the storage infrastructure: Better
manage the storage infrastructure to manage storage and
storage budget growth. Redirect resources to other health-
care initiatives with help from IBM.
With IBM Smarter Storage, efficiency features are built in,
ready to deploy and operate consistently to decrease space
requirements, simplify administration and improve efficiency
for active workloads. Technologies such as space-saving dedu-
plication and IBM® Real-Time Compression™, a patented
IBM technology that works on active primary data to reduce
space requirements up to 80 percent, mean data analytics run
faster because less data is stored.
IBM Smarter Storage is also cost-efficient; storing less means
buying less storage capacity. And an intuitive, integrated and
advanced common management interface is staff-efficient—
with the capability to manage pools of resources from one
location, administering multiple storage systems can take only
about half the time as with competing products.1
IBM Smarter Storage solutions can break the time-consuming
cycle of manually predicting IT demand, provisioning storage
and migrating data to balance performance and cost—freeing
IT professionals for other tasks. The ability to automatically
place information in a tiered infrastructure where it is cost-
effectively stored according to its importance provides a level of
responsiveness that is ideally suited to healthcare environments.
Policy-based automated backup and recovery can help align
disaster recovery priorities with recovery center capabilities
to protect data and support regulatory compliance.
A large university medical center realized
cost savings of more than USD160
million, enabling the organization to
invest in life-saving healthcare
innovations.
Apply big data capabilities for real-time
insights from new forms of information
As organizations increase focus on wellness and prevention,
they are implementing multi-channel patient engagement strat-
egies enabled by advanced analytics to help deliver better care.
Proactive care models involve delivering the most complete
data to the point of decision for more effective collaboration
and more personalized care. Through real-time communica-
tions and information sharing, patients gain better access to
care and increased convenience, whether mobile or in a care
facility. Managing large volumes of structured and unstructured
data securely and meeting expectations for real-time access to
information are key challenges.
Ensuring performance and adapting as data needs evolve are
fundamental to success. A recent IBM study predicted that by
2015, some 80 percent of the world’s data will be “uncertain”—
unstructured and unreliable data often derived from social
business technologies—and will require new management
techniques.2 Organizations with highly efficient data centers
are already learning how to deal with this; the most successful
implement four to six times more storage optimization
techniques than others.3
IBM Smarter Storage is self-optimizing
Built-in technologies can optimize performance and cost,
increase productivity, and virtualize more of the infrastructure
so that organizations can:
●● ●
Properly size storage deployments: IBM Smarter Storage
includes solutions that can automatically migrate the most
active data to solid-state drives (SSDs), maximizing perfor-
mance and taking full advantage of advanced disk technolo-
gies—helping avoid over-provisioning the storage
environment for peak workloads.

4. 4
Solution Brief
HealthcareIBM Systems and Technology
●● ●
Automate performance-tuning management: Healthcare’s
often inflexible IT architectures are a thing of the past with
IBM Smarter Storage, which continually analyzes data access
patterns and automatically moves data to the most appropri-
ate tier of storage. It can also simplify the movement of data
within and between storage systems—a key capability for
organizations that in the future will need to automatically
synchronize data between healthcare facilities to reduce the
risk of patient information loss or unavailability.
●● ●
More easily grow the virtual server infrastructure:
IBM Smarter Storage automatically optimizes data through-
put across an infrastructure so healthcare organizations can
get the most value from their increasingly diverse data, as
well as their servers and storage.
●● ●
Protect patient information against unauthorized access
using built-in encryption capabilities at minimal cost:
IBM Smarter Storage can help simplify the technical policies
and procedures that enable information access, audit and
integrity controls.
IBM Smarter Storage is optimized for rapidly growing informa-
tion management workloads, helping to make analytics and
business intelligence more effective and affordable. With its
continuous monitoring, built-in analytics, pattern recognition
and smart data placement technologies, IBM Smarter Storage
can improve the performance and efficiency of applications
that use big data. IBM Easy Tier® runs automatically and
can deliver up to a three times performance improvement.
The consistent high performance of IBM XIV® Storage for
all applications, coupled with the system’s zero tuning and
pain-free provisioning and its integration with cloud and service
management systems, is due to its “out-of-the-box” optimiza-
tion. And tiered storage optimization technologies move
volumes of data based on policies set by administrators.
An academic health center virtualized its
IT environment enabling anytime,
anywhere access to clinical applications
and patient information, helping to
improve practitioner productivity and
decision making.
Deploy robust clouds for increased
agility and health information access
Information-rich, patient-centered care models are primed
to benefit from cloud computing. Cloud-delivered services
enabled by open standards can support cooperation, collabora-
tive workflows and information sharing. Ultimately the shift to
these new work environments will facilitate continual improve-
ment and real-time exchange of ideas—whether by the patient
managing his or her own health or by providers communicating
with patients or collaborating with other professionals—
ultimately leading to better care. Stakeholders will be able to
connect to each other and respond to changing needs and the
latest medical breakthroughs almost as they happen.
Emerging collaborative partnerships and dynamic care delivery
networks will require the ability to effortlessly deliver the most
complete information, keep up with new demand and make
change happen—error-free. Agility is important. And clouds
are all about agility. They can deliver health services whenever
those services are required—whether at the provider facility or
the patient or consumer location—to meet high service levels at
an affordable cost.

5. 5
Solution Brief
HealthcareIBM Systems and Technology
IBM Smarter Storage is cloud agile
IBM Smarter Storage can simplify adoption of cloud computing
so organizations can more rapidly deliver services and realize
the benefits of healthcare innovation initiatives. Cloud-agile
IBM solutions can help facilitate collaborative partnerships by
supporting virtualized and cloud environments that can:
●● ●
Maximize storage utilization: IBM Smarter Storage adapts
easily to unpredictable workloads to support the dynamic
data needs of healthcare stakeholders. Its technologies can
automatically synchronize data between facilities in a care
delivery network so data can flow to providers and other
stakeholders anywhere, anytime.
●● ●
Automate cloud management: Automated, self-service
portals will allow cloud-based applications to easily access
the information they need—whenever they need it, with no
delays. Automated and self-service functions help drive down
the IT costs of provisioning and deployment. With policy-
based data management, information moves to users
automatically and securely without manual intervention, sim-
plifying and ensuring digital health information transmission.
Not only can these built-in tools simplify patient information
transmission security measures through policy and applica-
tion awareness, they can help organizations to better respond
to compliance reporting using cloud-based automation for
backup and archiving.
●● ●
Enable robust cloud expansion: With IBM Smarter
Storage, administrators can deploy clouds faster and manage
significantly more capacity than otherwise possible, providing
the elasticity to proactively and efficiently provision capacity
for dynamic consumer workloads. IBM Smarter Storage can
also take advantage of storage virtualization to maximize
storage already deployed in the organization—including
non-IBM systems—reducing new storage purchases.
Cloud approaches offer the opportunity to expand IT capacity
quickly without large capital investments. A modest 100-bed
hospital will generate approximately 60 GB of new digital con-
tent per bed per year, requiring at least an additional 6 TB of
storage space annually. Cloud-delivered IT resources can help
address the need for economical storage expansion, eliminating
the need to continue buying and supporting in-house storage
systems, lowering costs and helping with storage management.
Healthcare organizations will analyze growing volumes and
increasingly more complex information. Being cloud agile
means storage systems can move data where it can be used
most effectively, whether in the cloud or in a data center.
A world leader in medical supplies reduced
application response times by 30 percent,
allowing staff to be more responsive to
customer demands.
Why IBM?
As healthcare organizations work to redefine value and success
for their patients and stakeholders, they need to build the IT
capabilities that will be essential to healthcare transformation.
These capabilities need to flexibly and economically keep pace
with new clinical and business requirements and technology
evolution, while becoming a competitive tool for healthcare
innovation.
IBM combines decades of storage technology excellence,
experience and expertise with healthcare industry knowledge
and partnerships to help organizations unlock the value of
their data with analytics, gain storage efficiencies and spend
more of their IT budget on innovation initiatives and less on

6. maintaining current environments. Our experts can help assess
your storage and data management environments, bringing a
holistic perspective to identify savings potential and build IT
strategies that support current and future requirements.
IBM and our Business Partners bring a complete set of services,
software, storage and systems technologies to help reduce the
complexity and costs of your storage infrastructure and prepare
for future healthcare environments. Taking advantage of these
capabilities and applying leading practices can help you to
grow the value of your data, increase service levels and reduce
IT costs.
For more information
To learn more about IBM Smarter Storage, please contact
your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit:
ibm.com/systems/storage
Additionally, IBM Global Financing can help you acquire the
IT solutions that your business needs in the most cost-effective
and strategic way possible. We’ll partner with credit-qualified
clients to customize an IT financing solution to suit your busi-
ness goals, enable effective cash management, and improve your
total cost of ownership. IBM Global Financing is your smartest
choice to fund critical IT investments and propel your business
forward. For more information, visit: ibm.com/financing
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September 2012
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1 Edison Group, “Competitive Management Cost Study: IBM Storwize
V7000 vs. EMC VNX5500 Storage Systems,” April 2012. Retrieved
May 31, 2012, from http://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/en/
tsw03132usen/TSW03132USEN.PDF
2 IBM Research, “IBM Global Technology Outlook, 2012,”
http://www.zurich.ibm.com/pdf/isl/infoportal/GTO_2012_Booklet.pdf
3 IBM Corporation, “2012 IBM Global Data Center Study,”
http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/en/it-services/
data-center-efficiency-study.html
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