Formed in 1984, University HealthSystem Consortium (UHC) is an alliance of 103 academic medical centers and 210 of their affiliated hospitals representing approximately 90% of the nation's non-profit academic medical centers. UHC offers products and services designed to help its members achieve greater clinical, operational and fiscal performance while advancing knowledge, fostering collaboration, and promoting change to help members succeed in their respective markets.

Offering an array of performance improvement products and services, UHCs powerful databases provide comparative data in clinical, operational, faculty practice management, financial, patient safety, and supply chain areas. Web-based benchmarking tools and critical online knowledge bases are available to members seeking business intelligence to build and maintain their market shares. Maintaining and accessing this top-notch information depends upon availability of massive amounts of data storage.

Keeping up with an avalanche of data growth demands can quickly overburden and outdate most conventional storage infrastructures. UHC was experiencing frequent outages and sluggish response times for customer-facing applications in an already complex storage environment. The amount of data stored had doubled three times in six years, quickly diminishing storage capacity and performance. 

Also, older technology and a lack of dedicated storage personnel made it difficult to avoid downtime required for changes and updates. The existing IT architecture was unable to expand beyond managing current requirements or to embrace additional application demands and newer technologies. UHC needed a highly reliable, efficient and scalable storage system that could better safeguard the data which supports so many members.

Our small staff was overloaded with storage and downtime issues, and customers were beginning to complain about performance. UHC members depend on the availability of our data. We wanted to achieve greater levels of durability, protection and expandability with a storage infrastructure that would grow with the business and help us keep our commitments to members, says Steve Carlberg, Principal Network Administrator at UHC.

To support its exclusive offerings and corresponding data storage requirements, UHC implemented a highly available virtualized storage environment with Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V running Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software. 

UHCs new tiered storage solution is based on the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V, with built-in virtualization and Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software to consolidate internal and external heterogeneous storage into a common pool. The solution delivers critical services and efficiencies in one integrated platform, including universal data replication, logical partitioning, application centric storage management and automated I/O load balancing  all manageable from a single console with one set of tools. 

Dynamic Provisioning software enables non-disruptive volume expansion and thin provisioning, which allows storage to be allocated to an application without actually being physically mapped until needed. When additional physical capacity is required, it is automatically added to the pools and allocated to specified volumes. Hitachi Tiered Storage Manager software simplifies the migration of data to and from these volumes and does not require downtime. 

As a result of the new technologies, UHC IT staff can cost efficiently manage more terabytes with less effort, gaining simplified management, balanced resource utilization and performance, and greater application availability. For members of the University HealthSystem Consortium, this means better and faster access to the services that improve the performance of their healthcare organization, and therefore providing better care to patients. 

Within weeks of installation, Carlberg realized the magnitude of the decision to implement Universal Storage Platform V. Hitachi virtualization capabilities have vastly improved both performance and storage utilization. We are thrilled with the systems reliability and the number of tasks we can accomplish with very little effort, he says.

In this case, the technology was important as it provided the functionality and scalability needed for a large and growing healthcare consortium, while providing an easy to manage system for IT staff.

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The advantages of the upgraded IT system are two-fold. Not only does the technology greatly benefit the IT department, but it offers members better access to the resources needed to effectively treat patients. 

Our small staff was overloaded with storage and downtime issues, and customers were beginning to complain about performance, says Carlberg, discussing the old system. Hitachi virtualization capabilities have vastly improved both performance and storage utilization. My staff is thrilled with the systems reliability and the number of tasks they can accomplish with very little effort.

For Carlberg, the surprising benefit of the new system was the ease of day-to-day administration. 

The new system is a joy to use, particularly because it eliminates the time required to plan where to configure storage, he says. Carlberg noted that on UHCs old storage system, new volume deployments were difficult and demanded a lot of planning to achieve efficient utilization and performance. Creating a Virtual Volume takes a mere few minutes, and it saves Carlbergs team more than one week of an employees time per quarter.

This may not sound like much, he says, but it adds up quickly, and its time we can spend doing lots of other things. 

These benefits extend to UHCs members as well. The Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V allows UHC to accomplish goals that were previously challenging or simply unattainable.

Thanks to significantly better disk I/O performance, were doing things now that we werent able to contemplate on the old system, says Carlberg. 

For example, UHC is able to offer members a more complex array of reporting and analysis tools because system performance is stronger. The team recently rolled out an enhancement to one of the UHC customer service areas, and will release two more enhancements in the coming months. 

Carlberg considers cutting edge, reliable technology to be a strong competitive advantage in UHCs relationship with its members. The project wasnt about ROI per se, he says, but more about market retention and keeping that competitive advantage. Although no other organization offers an identical solution, UHCs competitors offer similar services. If UHC does not meet member needs, members can certainly go elsewhere. Carlberg believes that with the speed and reliability of the new system, members will have no reason to seek competing solutions. 

If possible, include an example of how the project has benefited a specific individual, enterprise or organization. Please include personal quotes from individuals who have directly benefited from your work. (In 600 words or less)

Our small staff was overloaded with storage and downtime issues, and customers were beginning to complain about performance, says Steve Carlberg, Principal Network Administrator at UHC, discussing the old system. Hitachi virtualization capabilities have vastly improved both performance and storage utilization. My staff is thrilled with the systems reliability and the number of tasks they can accomplish with very little effort.

Manageability is a piece of cake. This allows us to offer more services and more value to our members, says Don Naglich, Director of Technology Infrastructure at UHC. 

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The heart of UHCs solution involved the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V running Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software. IT administrators at UHC were excited about the new solutions promise to simplify storage management, optimize physical disk utilization and enhance performance. UHCs existing provisioning layout and management scheme enabled the UHC team to use only about 40 to 50 percent of UHC storage resources.

Since deployment, the Universal Storage Platform V has provided 100 percent uptime. With its newly acquired data movement capabilities, UHC can create volumes in minutes, easily migrate data across tiers or between volumes and perform online microcode updates. Staff now has the flexibility to place data and applications wherever they choose and to rapidly relocate data as necessary, without experiencing downtime. The IT staff is saving more than 100 employee hours per year on just volume configurations alone.

As an added benefit, UHC has reduced the server footprint by 25 percent, cut physical storage requirements by half, and minimized power consumption and cooling needs by 30 percent. 

The Universal Storage Platform V facilitates superb reliability and performance for worry free boot from SAN and faster response times for accessing stored data. We are very, very happy with our new response times. Every stored procedure and standard query that we could measure is running between 200 and 800 percent faster on the Hitachi system. We are confident weve chosen the right solution, says Carlberg.

UHC management is extremely pleased with the Hitachi Data Systems solution, which has already saved the organization money and employee resources through improved system performance and reduced downtime. For the small UHC storage team, the ability to accomplish so much with so little has been highly rewarding. Naglich noted that the improvements in manageability allow UHC to offer more to its members  more services and more value  without increasing staff. 

Carlberg marvels that before he explored the Hitachi Data Systems offering, he thought the dynamic provisioning technology might offer limited benefits. Why did I even consider not putting all of my storage into dynamic provisioning? asks Carlberg. It turned out to be an absolute no-brainer. 

For an organization that relies in part on its technology to retain members, the new systems reliability has proved to be a huge asset. Carlberg looks forward to implementing new UHC offerings in the coming months, which the Universal Storage Platform V can now easily accommodate. We are confident weve chosen the right solution and its been a pleasure as weve learned more and more about its capabilities, he said. Were eager to keep expanding and utilizing Hitachi technology. 

True to its company mission for change, UHC management issued a clear directive to the small IT staff: find the best storage solution available and quickly. With the existing storage system rapidly running out of space, Carlberg and staff developed a set of IT prerequisites to help with what became an exhaustive search among top vendors  on a deadline.

This decision was huge because its outcome represented a critical turning point in the way UHC processes data. We knew that the wrong solution might be hard to implement and manage  or worse, lack the scalability we needed for future growth, explains Carlberg.

The existing UHC storage environment included 180 servers, a StorageTek FLX280 used to store data collected from member hospitals and Microsoft® SQL Server 2000 as the primary database application. The complexities of the architecture consumed administrative time for tasks such as manually balancing system loads and labor intensive data migration and microcode updates. And at the current rate of data retention, administrators estimated that the FLX280 would run out of space in about a year. A new solution would need to boost system security, availability and scalability, eliminate unplanned downtime and accommodate an SQL Server upgrade. Cost efficiencies were also a priority, and Carlberg was interested in reducing the power draw per server and simplifying storage management.

UHC narrowed the list of contenders to two vendors with tiered storage virtualization capabilities. From there, only one vendor was able to deliver a superior service model and a guarantee of five nines uptime. You cant beat the Hitachi guarantee. That was another thing that no competitor we talked to was able to do. Hitachi is absolutely willing and able to stand behind its nines, Carlberg says. And no one could match the Hitachi customer service response time. It ultimately became the decision point between the two companies. 

Once selected and installed, members and IT staff were able to embrace the benefits and innovation of the new system almost immediately.

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For more than two decades, UHC has been a catalyst for change  offering its members unique programs and services that improve clinical, operational and financial performance. The organizations exclusive offerings rely heavily on massive stores of data from which members can derive business intelligence. 

With the implementation of the Universal Storage Platform V and Hitachis Dynamic Provisioning, University HealthSystem Consortium has become a model for similar organizations. From member services to IT maintenance, daily functions at UHC are faster, more reliable and allow for improved and expanded cooperation between members. 

Were increasing revenue and adding members  even in a downturn economy  in part because we can provide them with unmatched speed and access to our services and programs, said Carlberg. 

The entire University HealthSystem Consortium was able to embrace the benefits of the installation almost immediately. 

The Hitachi Data Systems consultants rapidly accomplished the initial installation and remained available to assist as needed with the Dynamic Provisioning software implementation. They also provided training to the UHC team members, who were pleased to see that maintaining the Universal Storage Platform V with Dynamic Provisioning software was something they could easily manage on their own. Manageability is a piece of cake. This allows us to offer more services and more value to our members, says Naglich. 

Another advantage of the new platform is that members are experiencing increased speed and accessibility to the products and services designed to achieve greater clinical, operational and fiscal performance.