GE Healthcare
Medical Specialist Saves Days with New Back up and Restore Strategy
Company Profile
GE Healthcare provides transformational medical technologies that are shaping a new age of patient care. GE Healthcare's expertise in medical imaging and information technologies, medical diagnostics, patient monitoring systems, disease research, drug discovery and biopharmaceuticals is dedicated to detecting disease earlier and tailoring treatment for individual patients.
GE Healthcare offers a broad range of services to improve productivity in healthcare and enable healthcare providers to better diagnose, treat and manage patients.
GE Healthcare is a $14 billion unit of General Electric Company (NYSE: GE) that is headquartered in the United Kingdom and employs more than 42,500 people committed to serving healthcare professionals and their patients in more than 100 countries.
Customer's Business Issues
Due to the nature of this work, employees are highly data dependent and must store and retrieve large amounts of project data. Storage requirements are growing as the company continues its development work.
This requires GE Healthcare to have a reliable IT infrastructure that can manage storage efficiently and ensure projects can be completed on time. However, its legacy environment could not handle the increase in data and a reduced back up window required more storage to tapes. This presented a problem when it came to efficient data retrieval and meant it could only keep a small amount of data in a secure way
- Use IT as a means to better serve practice and business process
- Increase storage space for the large data files being stored on legacy systems
- Reduce rising IT administration costs
Customer's Business Objectives
GE Healthcare's business objectives centred on how to:
- Retain electronic information and keep records safe
- Instantly retrieve archived information
- Delegate IT man resources to more critical tasks
Initial Customer Set up
The biggest concern for GE Healthcare surrounded the rapid growth of data and the amount of information it had to retain. In particular, its back up procedure, which utilised Digital Linear Tape (DLT) and small auto changers, was time consuming and difficult to manage.
"The IT team was working hard to keep it at a manageable level, but we got to the point where we were changing 48 tapes every week, which was unsustainable," says Alun John, Infrastructure Manager, GE Healthcare Limited.
The situation was compounded by the same system being used for backing up data and retrieving older files. In a company where data access is critical to productivity, employees would have to wait until the back up was complete before retrieval could begin.
"If we had to do a restore it might mean journaling 20 tapes, which couldn't be done until a slot appeared and it was increasingly difficult to schedule that work," says John. "We had to judge a request carefully to see whether it was for general business data or something that was critical to the manufacturing team."
With the original infrastructure unable to keep pace with business demands, GE Healthcare needed a solution to help it perform day-to-day tasks efficiently. It decided to implement a single back up platform, to reduce back up windows and improve the management of data retrieval.
The Logicalis Solution
Logicalis visited the company and produced a comprehensive analysis of the current infrastructure and identified improvements that could be made. Working closely with GE Healthcare, Logicalis implemented a Nexsan ATABeast disk-to-disk array, fully configured at 12 Terabytes to ensure ample headroom for future data growth. Dual active/active RAID controllers provide full failover with online access to data.
Running behind the hardware is Veritas Netbackup for data protection, tape sharing and non-disruptive back up of mission critical applications. This has proven performance with linear tape-open (LTO) storage, and the ability to share and recover files (and drives) across multiple servers. Media-management features include tape labelling, tape media pool creation, reporting capabilities and bar code support.
A new HP MSL6000 series tape library was introduced as the LTO changer to provide centralised back up to a single automated device. It has two LTO 2 drives, with capacity to install two more when needed.
To ensure the full transfer of skills, Logicalis worked alongside the IT department and provided full training on the latest features of the technology.
Hardware
- Nexsan ATABeast 12 Tb Disk-to-Disk Array
- Dual Active RAID Controllers
- New HP MSL6000 Tape Library
Software
- Veritas NetBackup
Services
- Solution design
- Implementation
- Skills transfer and documentation
- Project Management
- Ongoing Support and Consultancy
Ongoing Support
- Predefined SLA to deliver rapid response and resolution
Customer Benefits
- ATA disk-to-disk back up
- Veritas storage resource management
- Reduced back up time
- Retrieval cut from three days to instant
- Full knowledge transfer
Why Logicalis?
The new IT infrastructure has given GE Healthcare a more manageable back up and restore environment, and provided workers with better access to critical data. It has also introduced greater storage capacity and with up to 12 Terabytes of storage available, the solution will scale to meet company requirements.
GE Healthcare can take on more work, confident that should any storage issues arise, it has a back up and restore solution in place to deal with them.
"Previously, retrievals could take three days to find the right data sets and get them to the user. We even had occasions where it took almost three weeks," says John. "Now, it's just a mouse click and the information is available. For the end user that is a huge improvement - they get the file back and can continue with their work, rather than put it on hold while we retrieve the data."
The solution has also helped GE Healthcare's IT team to improve its service when urgent file requests are made and enabled it work more effectively. "We have a harmonised system that means we're not spending the majority of our time changing tapes," says John. "We can manage the system more effectively and look at more strategic issues, rather than pure day-to-day maintenance. We do not have to wait and schedule restores, they can be done on demand and are virtually immediate because they are on disk and not tape."
Although GE Healthcare has worked with Logicalis on a number of other storage solutions, John says he was constantly impressed by its proactive approach. "As usual, Logicalis' work was excellent from day one of the technical specification through to the implementation and on-the-job training," he adds.
Customer Business Issues
- Use IT as a means to better serve practice and business process
- Increase storage space for the large data files being stored on legacy systems
- Reduce rising IT administration costs
Benefits
- ATA disk-to-disk back up
- Veritas storage resource management
- Reduced back up time
- Retrieval cut from three days to instant
- Full knowledge transfer
The Logicalis Solution
- Design of solution
- Installation of all hardware
- Smooth integration with existing software and applications
- Project management
- On site skills transfer training
Partnerships
- HP
- Nexsan
- Veritas
