Deployed two IBM®XIV®StorageSystems, using the built-in migration toolto move existing data with near-zerodowntime. Decommissioned the old systems, reducing data center costs.

1. IBM XIV Storage Systems Healthcare
Case Study
North York General
Hospital doubles storage
performance
Cutting costs and simplifying management by
standardizing on IBM XIV
North York General Hospital (NYGH) is a Canadian community hospital
Overview with three main sites in Toronto, ON. The Hospital has close links with
the University of Toronto, and is one of Canada’s leading teaching hospi-
The need
tals. It employs 5,000 people including 962 medical staff, and handles
NYGH’s aging storage platforms were more than 111,000 emergency visits per year, admitting and treating over
struggling to keep up with the demands
of faster servers and growing data vol- 27,000 inpatients.
umes. The Hospital wanted a single
standard storage solution for all data. “Like all modern hospitals, NYGH relies heavily on IT systems to sup-
port both clinical and non-clinical operations,” comments Alshad Damji,
The solution IT Manager at NYGH. “Our main hospital information system (HIS)
Deployed two IBM® XIV® Storage plays a critical role in clinical management, and it is growing all the time:
Systems, using the built-in migration tool for example, we are currently building an electronic patient records sys-
to move existing data with near-zero tem, which will be very data-intensive. From the point of view of IT
downtime. Decommissioned the old
systems, reducing data center costs. infrastructure, this was creating a number of challenges.”
The benefit
The challenge of growth
The Hospital’s server infrastructure had recently been upgraded, but its
Doubled application performance by
reducing I/O bottlenecks. Provided a main storage environment was almost ten years old, and was reaching
single platform for all applications, and end-of-life.
simplified storage management.
Zero maintenance costs for the next
three years.
“We had expanded the main storage system as far as we could, but we
were still running out of capacity,” comments Brendan Kwolek, Systems
Engineer. “We estimated that within 12 months, we would have no space
left to expand the HIS. The limitations of the SAN had also forced us to
run most of our non-clinical systems on smaller direct-attached storage
systems, which made the infrastructure fragmented, complex and difficult
to manage.”
Damji adds: “There were performance issues too: the I/O performance of
the existing SAN was lagging behind the rest of the infrastructure. Even
though our servers had the latest processors and plenty of memory, the
overall system performance was limited by bottlenecks in the storage
infrastructure. We wanted to find a new platform that could offer us
greater capacity, higher performance, and a simpler, more standardized
and manageable infrastructure.”

2. IBM XIV Storage Systems Healthcare
Case Study
Finding the right technology
Since NYGH had not purchased a new enterprise storage solution for
“The fact that remote several years, its first priority was a full review of the products and tech-
mirroring, monitoring, nologies available from the leading vendors.
snapshots, thin provision-
“Before we even went to tender, we invited several vendors to visit and
ing and other tools are educate us about their latest products,” says Kwolek. “In many cases, the
all included as standard storage systems they showed us were larger, faster, more energy-efficient,
but not exactly revolutionary. But when IBM presented the XIV Storage
with the XIV is a huge System, we realized that it was on a whole other level from our existing
advantage. Tools like platform.”
these can cost hundreds of
The XIV Storage System uses a massively parallelized grid architecture to
thousands of dollars when deliver tier-one performance from relatively low-cost SATA disks, and
you need to buy them features an innovative graphical user interface that virtualizes and man-
ages the entire storage infrastructure while hiding the traditional com-
separately.” plexities of storage management from the user.
—Alshad Damji, IT Manager at NYGH
Unbelievable simplicity
“Our old system had a very inflexible user interface, but the XIV system is
very easy to use and runs on multiple operating systems—which is great
for those of us who don’t run Windows on our PCs and laptops,” com-
ments Kwolek. “Coming from a traditional storage administrator’s per-
spective, it’s actually hard to believe that managing storage can be this
simple. You don’t need to worry about RAID arrays or performance tun-
ing, and you don’t have to wait 20 to 30 minutes while the system formats
a volume. You can set up a new system with a few mouse-clicks.”
NYGH decided to purchase two XIV racks, each half-populated with
27 TB of usable disk capacity. This would be more than enough for the
immediate future of the HIS system, and would also provide enough
space to house the non-clinical applications. Once the XIV systems had
been delivered and some of the servers had been updated with the latest
patches, the Hospital began migrating its applications and data onto the
new platform.
Ease of migration
“We had good support from IBM, but the solution is so simple that we
were able to handle most of the implementation on our own,” comments
Damji. “The XIV migration tool is fantastic: once you’ve set it up, you
can leave it to run and the data is moved from the old systems onto the
XIV in the background. There’s zero downtime while the migration is
running, and hardly any noticeable impact on system performance. In
fact, our users had no idea it was happening – they just noticed that their
applications ran faster once it was completed!”
He adds: “Hospitals operate 24/7, so it’s always an issue if you’ve got to
take systems offline for any length of time. One of our main concerns
when we started thinking about the storage refresh was how we’d be able
2

3. IBM XIV Storage Systems Healthcare
Case Study
to move our data without the downtime causing major issues. The XIV
IBM solution components: completely solved the problem for us, and avoided what would probably
have been a long, painful and complicated set of migration projects.”
Hardware
● IBM® XIV® Storage System
Supporting a heterogeneous IT landscape
Software Currently, the Hospital is using one of the XIV systems for its clinical
● IBM AIX® applications, while the second supports back-office applications.
“At the moment we have both XIVs in our main hosting center, but in
the near future we plan to move one of them to a second site, and link
“Coming from a tradi- them using the XIV asynchronous remote mirroring feature,” says Damji.
tional storage adminis- “This will give us a really robust disaster recovery capability at no extra
cost. The fact that remote mirroring, monitoring, snapshots, thin provi-
trator’s perspective, it’s sioning and other tools are all included as standard with the XIV is a huge
actually hard to believe advantage. Tools like these can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars
that managing storage when you need to buy them separately.”
can be this simple… You Significant performance improvements
can set up a new system By significantly improving I/O performance, the introduction of the XIV
with a few mouse-clicks.” systems has enabled NYGH to eliminate the bottlenecks that were con-
stricting application performance. In the AIX environment, the average
proportion of time a process spends waiting on I/O has been reduced
—Brendan Kwolek, Systems Engineer at NYGH
from 14.2 percent to just 6.0 percent. This translates into a significant
increase in response time for many important applications and batch
processes.
IT Environment:
Operating systems “We do a full backup of our 850 GB HIS database every night, which
● Microsoft Windows
used to take six hours,” comments Kwolek. “Now we can do it in approx-
● Linux imately half the time, and we are seeing similar improvements in a lot of
other large batch processes. It even makes a difference to little things like
Databases
individual users’ login times, which have been reduced from 3.5 seconds
● Oracle
to just over 2 seconds. Better performance across the whole IT infrastruc-
● Sybase
● Microsoft SQL Server ture translates to a better user experience and fewer complaints, as well as
making our life easier in the IT department.”
Applications
● Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Damji concludes: “The success of the XIV implementation has enabled us
● Samba
to retire our old storage systems, reducing our rackspace requirements
Virtualization and thereby cutting data center hosting costs. It also means that we don’t
● VMware ESX Server have to pay maintenance fees on the old equipment, and since a service
● Citrix XenServer contract is included with the XIV systems, we will enjoy three years of
zero maintenance for our storage infrastructure. But cost isn’t the most
important factor: the main benefit of this project is that we now have a
fast, resilient and flexible storage architecture that will support NYGH’s
mission-critical IT systems for years to come.”
3

4. For more information
Contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit
us at: ibm.com/storage/disk/xiv/
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