SCIENCE

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To securely archive and protect growing amounts of clinical and diagnostic patient data, the University of Michigan Health System has deployed two Oracle StorageTek SL8500 Modular Library Systems.

The University of Michigan Health System includes numerous hospitals, health centers and clinics, the University of Michigan Medical School and its Faculty Group Practice, the clinical activities of the University of Michigan School of Nursing and the Michigan Health Corp.

As part of its tiered storage strategy, the University of Michigan Health System needed a tape solution that could archive diagnostic imaging for several areas, including radiology and adult and pediatric cardiology, totaling more than 550,000 radiology exams per year.

The StorageTek SL8500 Modular Library System delivers a highly scalable, reliable and cost-effective storage solution to help the University of Michigan Health System with heterogeneous data protection, consolidation and long-term data preservation.

Using the StorageTek SL8500 Modular Library Systems, the University of Michigan Health System is able to archive more than 30 terabytes of compressed data (2.5 to 1) per year with scalable capacity to handle an expected 20-30 percent increase in data year over year.

Oracle’s StorageTek T10000 tape drives are used for large data sets that are accessed infrequently while Oracle’s StorageTek 9480 tape drives provide fast data access to smaller files.

The University of Michigan Health System archives 12 Picture Archiving Communications Systems (PACS) to the StorageTek SL8500 Modular Library Systems.

Additionally, the University of Michigan Health System uses Oracle’s Sun SPARC servers and Oracle’s Sun Storage Archive Manager (SAM) -- hierarchical storage management software that enables policy-based and automated tiered storage from data creation through deletion. The new SPARC servers’ faster I/O capabilities reduced the time to run SAM’s recycling processing jobs -- that repackage media and reclaim space used by data that is no longer needed -- by 50 percent.

Oracle’s tape product family delivers the most cost and energy efficient solution in the storage hierarchy for customers that need to archive and protect growing amounts of data.

Supporting Quote

“Oracle’s StorageTek SL8500 Modular Library System is part of our tiered storage strategy, providing a very cost-effective, high-performance archive of our critical patient data,” said Steve Ramsey, director of Image Management and Computing Services for the Radiology Department at the University of Michigan Health System. “The library provides us with an extremely reliable, scalable and cost-effective storage solution within a very constrained datacenter environment with limited power and cooling.”