With over 700 000 lives currently covered, and taking on an estimated 200 000 new clients per year since 1998, local health insurance giant, Discovery Health, is not only realising its vision of "making people healthier and enhancing their lifestyle," but also seeing exponential storage growth.
In an environment such as this, with disk growth close on a 100 percent between January 1999 and January this year, and current volumes exceeding 7TB, reliability, availability, performance monitoring and management of its disk environments were prime considerations in the move to EMC. "Downtime is not an option in the highly competitive market space we operate in, where client service is ultimately a differentiating factor," says Patrice Bouic, assistant GM - IT Networks at Discovery Health.
Discovery`s previous storage infrastructure was not meeting its expectations; the company was experiencing multiple hardware failures, which led to costly downtime. Since 24 x 7 operations are a prerequisite in the Health Industry, it needed to reduce the backup window, speed up batch runs and accommodate disk storage growth.
"Some of the more specific problems we experienced included performance problems on our database and time consuming daily replication of our storage environment," comments Bouic.
"We could not afford a single point of failure, and EMC successfully addressed our requirements, not only for reliability and replication, but also in terms of our need for remote management and support."
Discovery chose an EMC Symmetrix originally for its NT environment, and implemented their Exchange Server, SQL Server, JDE Financials and Imaging storage. After the success of the NT Rollout onto EMC^2 Symmetrix, a year later, the Unix environment was earmarked for the migration to an EMC^2 Enterprise Storage Network (ESN) solution. The three-month implementation covered the business areas of Client Fund Management, the Discovery Health Database, the Discovery Life database, the Internet systems and the Oracle Data Warehouse environment. This also involved migration of all NT systems into this ESN for central control and management.
Redundancy in support of Disaster Recovery was achieved through EMC`s SRDF (Symmetrix Remote Data Facility) software product. High availability was provided by a combination of Symmetrix and Connectrix systems, moving from point to point fibre channel topology to a switched fabric, fibre channel infrastructure. A more appealing cost option also swayed the equation in EMC`s favour.
Symmetrix benefits include full storage redundancy for critical areas of the business, centralised disk management, performance monitoring and remote copies of data for business continuance. "The EMC solution provided Discovery Health with a reduction of the backup window, multiple path I/O, automatic load balancing and storage area network control," says Jonathan Clarke, senior technical account manager at EMC SA.
"As an integrated Enterprise Storage Network solution, Symmetrix provides a single point for total Storage Management, Protection and Sharing of the mission critical information." he says.
Discovery`s backup strategy into the future will incorporate SRDF and TimeFinder Software across all major systems offering Point-in-time copies of the Production volumes.
"We have seen added reliability, a significant reduction of downtime and complete elimination of disk failures since opting for EMC. We have saved costs on our future maintenance burden, with added stability and availability as well as increased throughput and performance enhancements," Bouic concludes.
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