1. technology and computing
2. data centers

Success Story
Children’s Hospital
Futureproofs IT with Highly
Scalable NetApp Storage
Another NetApp
solution delivered by:
KEY HIGHLIGHTS
Industry
Healthcare
The Challenge
Eliminate an aging storage
­environment to better support
all tiers of clinical and IT applications and elevate patient care.
The Solution
Consolidate on NetApp®
FAS6210HA clusters for
production and a FAS3240
storage ­system for data archival.
Benefits
• Provides tight integration
with Merge PACS images
• Decreases storage requirements by more than one third
• Reduces recovery-time
objectives from 24 to 4 hours
for top-tier systems
• Futureproofs the IT infrastructure to minimize future capex
costs
Customer Profile
Children’s Hospital Central California is
a not-for-profit state-of-the-art children’s
hospital on a 50-acre campus situated
on the bluffs of the San Joaquin River
in Madera, California. With 348 beds
and a medical staff of more than 525
physicians, Children’s Hospital Central
California is the second-largest children’s
hospital in California and one of the
10 largest hospitals of its type in the
nation. The mission of Children’s
­Hospital Central California is to p
­ rovide
high-quality, comprehensive healthcare
services to children, regardless of their
ability to pay, and to continuously improve
the health and well being of children.
The Challenge
Continually raising the bar
in pediatric healthcare
Children’s Hospital Central California
has cared for hundreds of thousands
of children since its founding in 1951.
The hospital has earned such accolades as the Beacon Award for Critical
Care Excellence and the LeapFrog
Group Award for Excellence in Patient
Safety and Health Care Quality. It is
the first children’s hospital west of the
Rockies to receive Magnet Nursing
designation and has earned accredi­
tation by the Joint Commission.
As the only children’s hospital in
­Central California, the hospital depends
on an exceptional staff to provide
­quality healthcare to its patients. The
organization also strives to improve
its healthcare services by continually
incorporating new ideas, methodologies,
and technologies into its many hospital
programs. Recently, the hospital identified opportunities to improve operations
with a new storage solution to support
and protect its PACS, access control,
pharmacy, inventory management,
e-mail, file-sharing, billing, and other
mission-critical applications.
“Given the nature of our pediatric care
services, our IT team must comply with
stringent service-level agreements for
system uptime, quick access to patient
data, and reliable data protection,” says
Kirk Larson, vice president and chief
information officer, Children’s Hospital
Central California. “We need a storage
platform that can deliver enterpriseclass high availability and enable a
superior disaster recovery plan.”
“Our hospital data is growing at a rate of
25% annually. Regardless of which medical
systems and services we decide to expand
or launch in the next few years, our NetApp
storage solution will grow with us, given
its scalability.”
Kirk Larson
Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Children’s Hospital Central California
The IT team wanted to streamline IT
operations and reduce costs through
storage platform efficiency. The hospital
also needed a highly scalable storage
platform that would help futureproof its
IT investments and accommodate
potential future storage needs of
its Merge PACS environment and
­MEDITECH EMR system.
Children’s Hospital’s IT management
worked with CDW Healthcare, a technology solutions provider and participant in the NetApp Partner Program,
to develop the right storage solution
for its current and future healthcare
requirements. The organization wanted
to forge a strategic partnership with
the new storage provider for important
expertise in deploying and managing
the storage solution at a healthcare
organization. A collaborative decision
led to NetApp storage.
“CDW is a multibrand provider, but we
ultimately gave a firm recommendation
for a NetApp storage solution that we
believed was the best fit for Children’s
Hospital,” says Brian Pieters, executive
account manager at CDW Healthcare
and long-time IT consultant to the hospital. Adds Larson, “Based on my previous experience with NetApp storage in
a healthcare environment, I was very
interested in continuing the relationship.
NetApp was the clear choice.”
The Solution
Embrace technology innovation
Children’s Hospital Central California,
assisted by technology partner CDW
Healthcare and NetApp Professional
Services, deployed NetApp FAS6210HA
clusters in its primary and disaster
recovery data centers. The secondary
site also hosts a FAS3240 storage
­system for data archival, particularly
important for meeting Health Insurance
Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
and other regulatory requirements.
The team successfully migrated dozens
of hospital systems and 135TB of data
to the NetApp storage platform, pro­
viding fast, secure, reliable 24/7 access
to clinical and administrative data.
NetApp supports many of the hospital’s
mission-critical clinical and business
applications such as Merge PACS,
Microsoft ® SharePoint ® Server 2007,
Microsoft SQL Server ® 2005 and
2008 R2, GroupWise Messaging,
3M Coding and Reimbursement
­System, and others.
“The transition of our critical healthcare
systems and patient data to the unified
NetApp storage platform has gone very
smoothly, and, importantly, with no
interruption to our hospital staff,” notes
Larson. “We are confident that we will
experience the same smooth transition
when we migrate our MEDITECH systems and EMR data to the NetApp
­platform in the future.”
The hospital protects its clinical and
administrative data with NetApp integrated data protection, which provides
high-availability, backup, compliance,
and disaster recovery capabilities
from a single platform. The IT team
­protects data locally with Snapshot™
and ­SnapRestore® technologies.
­SnapManager ® for Microsoft SQL
Server and Virtual Storage Console
enable IT to efficiently manage dataprotection activities in the hospital’s
e-mail, relational database, and virtualization environments.
As part of its business continuity plan,
the team will leverage SnapMirror ®
and SnapVault® technologies to perform
disk-to-disk replication between its
­primary and secondary data centers,
reducing its recovery-time objectives
from 24 to 4 hours for top-tier systems.
NetApp RAID-DP® technology protects
hospital systems against double disk
failures.
NetApp storage and VMware® vSphere®
5.0 provide the foundation for the
­hospital’s virtualization strategy, which
reduces the organization’s hardware
costs while increasing IT flexibility and
scalability. The hospital runs 300 virtual
servers in its 85% virtualized infrastructure that includes MEDITECH EMR,
Kronos Workforce Central, Lawson
ERP, and other systems. In addition,
NetApp and VMware View™ 4.6 deliver
Primary Data Center
Disaster Recovery Data Center
NetApp FAS6210c
Running NetApp
Data ONTAP 8.0
NetApp FAS6210c
Virtual Storage Console
NetApp SnapManager for SQL
NetApp SnapManager for Exchange
10GbE
10GbE
Brocade 5100
8Gb FC Switches
Brocade 5100
8Gb FC Switches
NetApp SnapVault
NetApp SnapMirror
NetApp Flash Cache
iSCSI, FC, CIFS, NFS, FCoE
Virtual
Storage
Tier
NetApp SnapRestore
NetApp Deduplication
NetApp Snapshot Technology
NetApp FAS3240
Figure 1) Children’s Hospital Central California storage infrastructure.
450 virtual desktops to users in the
inpatient areas and Neonatal ICU,
­Pediatric ICU, ER, and other departments via desktop computers, laptops,
and mobile devices.
NetApp storage efficiency helps the
hospital optimize its IT investment while
streamlining storage management,
enabling IT resources to devote more
time to new and innovative projects that
help the hospital improve patient care.
NetApp deduplication reduces the
­hospital’s storage requirements by
more than one third. The NetApp Virtual
Storage Tier combines NetApp efficiency
technologies with Flash Cache intelligent caching to prioritize I/O data
requests. Hospital staff members can
access the right data at the right time,
while the IT department can deliver
a more dynamic and cost-effective
infrastructure.
Business Benefits
Unified storage and application
integration
Children’s Hospital Central California
leverages the NetApp unified storage
platform and important application integration to reduce cost and complexity
and meet its SLA requirements for system availability. For example, NetApp
alliances with Microsoft and VMware
provide the hospital with the application
integration that enables IT to automate
backup and recovery of VMware,
Microsoft SQL Server, and Microsoft
SharePoint applications. The technology
partnership between NetApp and
Merge PACS provides system integration that helps accelerate the hospital’s
clinical workflows and data retrieval
times.
“NetApp and Merge PACS are equally
focused on meeting the patient care
and budgetary challenges that today’s
healthcare institutions face,” says Jeff
Surges, chief executive officer at Merge
Healthcare. “Through our technology
partnership, we can help deliver a more
effective and efficient healthcare experience for Children’s Hospital patients
and physicians.”
Adds Larson, “Our cardiologists, radiologists, and other caregivers devoted
to our 40 subspecialties need immediate
access to digital images to effectively
diagnose and treat our patients. At the
same time, our IT department needs
a level of application integration that
enables them to provide affordable
image sharing and archiving, proactively
monitor and maintain systems to ensure
ongoing availability, and meet HIPAA
compliance. By working together to
deliver an integrated solution, NetApp and
Merge PACS help Children’s Hospital
accomplish all of this and more.”
Futureproofing the IT infrastructure
The hospital is further increasing the
returns on its storage investment by
positioning for growth with the built-in
scalability of the FAS6210HA and
FAS3240 storage systems and the
management ease provided by Data
ONTAP® 8 software. NetApp integration
with the hospital’s virtualization solutions provides additional scalability.
Children’s Hospital can seamlessly
grow its PACS and other systems and
derive maximum benefit from these
systems, while caregivers continue to
have ready access to growing stores
of medical data and imagery.
“Our hospital data is growing at a
rate of 25% annually,” says Larson.
“Regardless of which medical systems
and services we decide to expand or
launch in the next few years, our
NetApp storage solution will grow
with us, given its scalability.”
Strategic partnerships and
a bright future
Besides leveraging NetApp scalability
to confidently face future growth,
­Children’s Hospital Central California
will continue to leverage its partnership
with NetApp to help move the hospital
forward. “When we invested in NetApp
storage, we invested in a strategic partnership,” notes Larson. “The NetApp
“Children’s Hospital Central California is
genuinely a very happy NetApp customer,
because NetApp and CDW Healthcare
are on the journey with us.”
Kirk Larson
Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Children’s Hospital Central California
team takes a consultative approach to
the sales and implementation processes,
but their commitment to Children’s
Hospital doesn’t stop there. NetApp
and CDW Healthcare deliver vital
­support that helps us dynamically align
our storage solution with the needs of
our physicians, nurses, administrators,
staff, and patients. Children’s Hospital
Central California is genuinely a very
happy NetApp customer, because
NetApp and CDW Healthcare are on
the journey with us.”
SOLUTION COMPONENTS
NetApp Products
NetApp FAS6210HA storage clusters
Deduplication
Third-Party Products
VMware vSphere 5.0
VMware View 4.6
Stoneware Virtual Web Desktop
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and
2008 R2
Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007
Merge PACS
MEDITECH EMR
GroupWise
3M Coding and Reimbursement
System
Kronos Workforce Central
Lawson ERP
Protocols
CIFS, NFS, iSCSI, Fibre Channel,
FCoE, 10GbE
Partner
CDW Healthcare
www.CDW.com/communit
NetApp FAS3240 storage systems
Data ONTAP 8.0
Flash Cache
Snapshot technology
SnapRestore
SnapMirror
SnapVault
SnapManager for Microsoft
SQL Server
Virtual Storage Console
www.netapp.com
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