Galway University Hospitals (GUH) choose Origina to

implement Dynamic SAN solution

Introduction:

Galway University Hospitals (GUH) is made up of University Hospital Galway and Merlin Park University Hospital Galway, who provide secondary, regional and supra-regional services for the Health Service Executive – West.

It is one of the major academic teaching hospitals in Ireland. The hospitals aim to deliver high quality and equitable care for all its patients, in a safe and secure environment and to achieve excellence in clinical practice, teaching, training and research.

Project Summary:

The organisation’s IT requirements are vast and spread across the various departments and hospital sections. Over the last number of years the IT team has embraced virtualisation technologies and most systems now sit in a virtual environment which allows the IT department a certain amount of flexibility when it comes to day-to-day server administration and provisioning.

Through their partnership with Origina, GUH devised a pioneering new storage framework for the entire organisation. Origina’s storage architects designed a solution built on Compellent’s storage technologies that deliver a variety of benefits that solved the organisations current storage issues and was able to facilitate their requirements for the future.

The Challenges / Issues:

While GUH IT team had fully embraced virtualization technologies, they still faced major storage problems which were far from being simple or efficient. GUH faced the ongoing issue that departments were unable to accurately estimate the storage for their systems.

Therefore this resulted in LUN’s being located and over a period of time were being massively underutilised, for example the wastage of disks and complex out of hours storage. By June 2008, their storage levels were at a critical level for GUH, not only were they on the verge of running out of storage, but they were close to capacity on the model of SAN they were currently using.

Problems were compounded further by the fact that their existing SAN was also past its end of life and could not be upgraded, their only option was to increase their budget and buy a new one. And although their existing SAN vendor was happy to sell them a new SAN there was no way the same problem could be avoided in the next three years.

The Solution:

By working with the Origina innovation and development team, GUH was able to devise a pioneering a new storage solution. This new storage framework could then be utilized through the entire organisation. Origina’s storage architects designed a solution that was built on the Compellent storage technologies that delivered a vast variety of benefits that solved the organizations major storage problems and more importantly it was able to facilitate their requirements going forward.

The Business Benefits:

By implementing this new storage system, GUH was able to take advantage of a number of benefits, these benefits included:

• Reduce ever increasing costs when managing an organisation’s storage infrastructure, these costs are usually made up of; data centre space, power and cooling, acquisition costs and the cost of storage administrators.
• The thin provisioning feature of the Compellent storage solution radically reduced the number of disks and IT department purchased. The Compellent SAN only consumes disk space when data is actually written; therefore results in less storage being taken up but does not sacrifice overall performance.
• By deploying a virtual data centre, GUH saves well beyond on disk costs by assisting them with their current data centre resources and helping them shrink their data centre footprint through reduced expansion costs and facility limitations.
• GUH can take advantage on saving on unnecessary upgrades and using the Compellent Enterprise manager resource management software, which allows an IT department view a ‘Green Report’ a powerful tool to assess energy and CO2 costs emissions.
• This new SAN solution is easier to administer; which frees up administrators time and elimination the need for extensive out of hours or weekend work.

Why choose Origina?

GUH had researched a number of different SAN solutions which helped them determine a list of key requirements to address their current issues and future requirements. From this, they went onto examine a number of different storage solutions, but Origina’s Compellent solution was the only one that matched all their storage requirements.

Origina’s in-house innovation and development team seek to develop new and creative solutions for the GUH. The Origina team focused their attention on the latest innovative products in the technical industry with an objective of bring their finding s to their clients such as GUH.

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