Medical organizations globally are facing limited budgets, constant application changes, mounting data levels and the need to maintain business continuity for critical day-to-day activities. ZSP, one of Germany's leading Psychiatric Hospital and Psychotherapy Centers, to meet these challenges worked with CEMA AG to design a fully redundant and flexible storage networking infrastructure. ZSP evaluated HP, EMC and Siemens offerings; however the benefit of hardware independence, automatic "virtual Capacity" provisioning capabilities and the compelling ROI and total cost of ownership made the choice obvious. DataCore SANmelody running on low-cost Dell PC servers met the availability requirements and provided the maximum return and productivity. "Pursuant to a thorough investigation, including an ROI study, we opted for SANmelody as it enabled us to greatly reduce storage costs, improve administrative productivity and maximize disk space usage whilst reducing downtime through redundancy," continued Volker Kober, Director of IT at ZSP. "The IT staff is using network wide mirroring and the automated provisioning capabilities of SANmelody to reduce administrative effort, simplify operations, support and protect the wide range of administrative and clinical systems that comprise our Hospital Information System infrastructure." ZSP recently added a number of commercial Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server-based applications to deal with growth in patient care, psychiatric health monitoring, learning management, and information management. With the IT staff fielding requests for server after server to support specialized applications, provisioning and managing SQL Server database storage were becoming real headaches. SANmelody gave administrators the ability to easily add disk space over the SAN without the need to reconfigure hardware, open up systems or even reboot application servers. At ZSP, SANmelody was used to transform the standard Dell PC servers into cost-effective SAN disk servers. A far more cost-effective and flexible alternative to conventional storage arrays, they are simpler to set up and are easily expanded. Best of all, they future proof the storage investment since users have complete choice in which hardware they purchase or upgrade. "To achieve its mission, ZSP Hospital-like all cutting-edge medical facilities-faced a major challenge - the tradeoff of keeping costs low while providing maximum uptime and access to users," stated Tobias Wellhausen, VP of Sales at CEMA AG. "Having worked with many healthcare organizations and deploying dozens of DataCore solutions, we knew ZSP could avoid the tradeoff. We implemented an affordable open solution that fully mirrored their infrastructure, increased user productivity and met the key requirement to protect their critical patient and business data" " Volker Kober stressed the key point, "Our decision weighs cost heavily, however our ability to protect and access up-to-date, accurate medical and information records is essential for the hospital's business and patient well being and therefore was the major criteria in making the choice to go with a fully mirrored DataCore solution." We are proud of our association with ZSP and having quality partners like CEMA who can meet the needs of healthcare organizations throughout Germany," noted Christian Hagen, Director of DataCore's Central Europe Operations.