Erasmus MC finds the
remedy for its data
Case Study
Objective
Implement a high performance, reliable
and cost- eective storage solution
Approach
Investigated the market and based
decision on pre-agreed performance
requirements and price
IT Matters
• Delivers flexible four tier storage and
transparent access to cost eective
tape storage
• Ensures vital 24x7 availability,
including online updates
• Provides the level of performance
required for this demanding
environment
Business Matters
• Uses Flexible Capacity pay-per-use to
reduce Total Cost of Ownership and
cost per GB
• Supports Erasmus Medical Center
in oering competitive services to
internal departments and to
other hospitals
• Enables compliance with government
regulations on medical data storage
storage headache
HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage is delivered
as a Flexible Capacity Service
Technology is now an
integral part of improving
the delivery of healthcare
services but that means
hospitals are facing a data
explosion. With its data
volumes increasing by
1TB a day, Rotterdam’s
Erasmus Medical Center
found the answer to
its storage needs with
pay-per-use HPE 3PAR
StoreServ Storage.
Challenge
Rapid data growth
Technology is now an integral part of
delivering eicient healthcare services,
but the backlash of this is that hospitals
face an explosion in the amount of data
they need to manage. This is a huge and
ever increasing challenge for Rotterdam’s
Erasmus Medical Center (MC), which has
generated the same amount of data in the
last two years that it had generated in the
previous 35 years.
Erasmus MC is the city’s university hospital
and is the largest and most versatile of
the eight university medical centres in
the Netherlands. Employing 14,000 sta,
including 1,300 physicians and 3,000
nurses, it operates from various locations in
Rotterdam, including the Sophia Children’s
Hospital and the Daniel den Hoed Cancer
Institute. With almost 1,100 beds, its main
objectives are patient care, research and
education and it ranks as the top European
institution in clinical medicine.
Case study
Erasmus Medical
Center
“Our storage system has to be reliable, flexible, performant and the right
price. All of these requirements are met by HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage.”
— Nico Drost, IT director, Erasmus Medical Center
Industry
Healthcare
Page 2
Also providing services for Rotterdam Eye
Hospital and the Rijndam Rehabilitation
Center, Erasmus MC’s IT team supports
almost 13,000 PCs, has over 70,000 active
network points, more then 300 operational
databases, 1,000 physical and virtual servers
and 500 applications.
“We produce about 1TB of new data each
day,” explains Nico Drost, IT director at
Erasmus MC. “The oice applications are
only a small part of what we do. We maintain
the financial systems, personnel systems,
patient systems.
“A long time ago we only had text-based IT
so no multi-media was stored, but in the last
ten years that has changed.
“For example, we now have Genome
applications which enable us to analyse
patients’ blood specimens and chart their
DNA. This is all done as an image and
every patient record is about 1.5TB of data.
With 2,000 patients, that alone would
require 3PB of storage.”
Erasmus MC needed an overall solution
that would boost the eiciency of its IT
environment while reducing complexity,
and a vital component of that was a versatile
storage infrastructure that could scale both
up and down.
This is particularly important in the
Netherlands where it is a legal requirement
to store relevant patient data for 115 years
and there are many compliancy issues
surrounding medical data.
Solution
Flexible delivery
After going out to tender and measuring
vendors against agreed performance
requirements, Erasmus MC signed a five
year IT pay-per-use agreement with Hewlett
Packard Enterprise, covering a range of
Converged Infrastructure solutions and
services. Phase One of the architectural
build-out has replaced the previous
end-of-life HPE EVA storage with one
HPE 3PAR StoreServ 10000 storage system
and one HPE 3PAR StoreServ 7400 Storage
system with total capacity of 1PB.
The agreement includes Storage Area
Network (SAN) switching and HPE ProLiant
BL460 blade server, and HPE has also
delivered an on-site private cloud solution
with proactive support and consulting,
to provide Microsoft® email and agenda
functionality on a pay-per-use basis for
the centre’s 22,000 mailboxes.
Case study
Erasmus Medical
Center
Industry
Healthcare
Page 3
Storage is in four tiers - fiber channel,
near-line, soft disc and tape. The primary
tier is based on an HPE 3PAR StoreServ
10800 Storage system at the main data
center with a smaller HPE 3PAR StoreServ
10400 Storage system at the secondary
data center. Some data is directly replicated
between the sites and Erasmus MC uses
HPE 3PAR Remote Copy software which
provides autonomic replication and Tier 1
disaster recovery technology.
To reduce the cost per gigabyte, a Quantum
StorNext hierarchical management layer
has been introduced on top of the 3PAR
StoreServ Storage so most of the data now
goes from production to disc for intermediate
retrieval, and to tape archive for long-term
retention. The hospital’s Picture Archiving &
Communication System (PACS) has its own
separate storage.
The storage equipment is provided under an
HPE Flexible Capacity agreement, whereby
HPE retains ownership but Erasmus MC
pays according to how much data it stores.
HPE uses StorNext to manage capacity,
ensuring that there is always a ten percent
buer. Alerts are triggered when the
80 percent threshold has been broken
and the next capacity block is signed o.
Benefits
Cost eective and reliable
HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage delivers the
stability and reliability that is vital for this
24x7 hospital environment.
“HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage delivers
better performance and guaranteed
uptime than the previous system and
was the closest fit for our performance
requirements,” says Drost.
“Updates can now be done online when
previously we had to go down for several
hours. Also, the advantages of pay-per-use
with are enormous. We used to have a utility
ready storage solution and we were not able
to predict the amount of storage volume
required. With Flexible Capacity, we can
easily anticipate the capacity we need which
means we no longer have a lot of unused
storage and only pay for what we use, and
that saves money.”
Costs are also kept down by the archiving
system suggested by HPE. Erasmus MC
benefits from cheaper tape storage but its
researchers and other sta can have access
to their tape-based data transparently,
as though it was on primary storage.
This is made possible by HPE Linear
Tape File system which makes tape
self-describing, file-based, and easy-to-use.
Case study
Erasmus Medical
Industry
Healthcare
Center
Customer at a glance
Hardware
• HPE StoreEver ESL G3 Tape Library
• HPE ProLiant BL460 Gen8 blade server
• HPE 3PAR StoreServ 10000 Storage
• HPE 3PAR StoreServ 7400 Storage
• HPE ProLiant BL460 G7 blade server
• HPE BladeSystem
Software
• Quantum StorNext
• Linear Tape File System
• HPE 3PAR Remote Copy
HPE services
• HPE Flexible Capacity
“Using on-demand HPE Flexible Capacity means that we
no longer risk running out of storage capacity or having
too much money tied up in unused storage.”
— Nico Drost, IT director, Erasmus Medical Centre
It provides the ability to use standard file
operations on tape media for accessing,
managing and sharing files with an interface
that behaves just like a hard disk.
This stable and flexible solution combined
with trustworthy capacity management
enables Erasmus to not only provide
cost-eective storage for its own internal
departments, but also supports it in oering
competitively-priced storage to other
hospitals as a service provider.
Its reliability and availability also
allow Erasmus MC to comply with the
government’s stringent regulations on the
storage of medical and research data.
“Using HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage to
support a four tier storage solution is
providing us with a high level of flexibility,”
concludes Drost.
“It’s meeting all our requirements and we
don’t receive any complaints from our
hospitals regarding their documents and
images that are stored on the system.
It’s all going well.”
Learn more at
hpe.com/storage
hpe.com/services/fc
Sign up for updates
Rate this document
© Copyright 2014-2015 Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP. The information contained herein is subject to change
without notice. The only warranties for HPE products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying
such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HPE shall not be liable for
technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.
Microsoft is a U.S. registered trademark of the Microsoft group of companies.
4AA5-3434EEW, November 2015, Rev. 2
Loading...