Capricorn Technologies PetaBox frees up expensive data storage for Independent Community Hospital

Mission Hospitals was formed from Asheville, North Carolina’s two private acute care hospitals in the late 1990’s. An organizational partnership in 1996 was followed by a full merger in 1999 when St. Joseph’s Hospital was purchased from the Sisters of Mercy by Memorial Mission Medical Center.

As with all health-provider organizations, safely and securely housing and serving patient records and medical images is only one consideration when determining an overall data storage and access strategy. There are many functional considerations that must also be assessed when determining how and where to place information that is important to the smooth daily operation of the organization but is not critical in a life-sustaining sense.

Mission Hospitals’ systems administration staff had been using a range of tools to address their various data storage requirements and Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) plan. In this case, they were expressly interested in dividing up a single large file server that was attached to their most expensive SAN storage and used by their helpdesk to store snapshots of workstations. These snapshots are large files, helpful in diagnosing and troubleshooting system issues, but needed and kept for a short period of time only.

The hospital was in the process of redesigning their network environment and making decisions about how best to address an increasingly multi-tiered storage landscape . Along the way, they realized that it did not make a strong business case to store data that was important to keep but infrequently accessed on their most expensive and highest-performing storage platform. In pursuing alternatives, IT staff came across the GB1000 and information about Capricorn Technologies affordable nearline storage devices on Slashdot.org. Timing for the discovery of Capricorn’s devices was ideal. Hospital staff had made the final decision to move data from the primary server to a platform that could accommodate files that would be accessed too often to be candidates for archival storage, but did not need the performance/redundancy of even tier 2 storage. The GB1000 platform, combined with an open source software solution, seemed to be a good possible fit. The GB1000 provided a low cost platform with a lot of storage that would allow hospital IT staff to effectively store and serve data on demand while also delivering a short term disk storage pool that could be purged frequently.

According to Luke Butterworth, Mission Hospital’s Storage Administrator, “We purchased the GB1000 data storage unit to see how it would fit into our ILM and server consolidation strategy. At the time, we were storing some very dynamic and unstructured data with low business value on our most expensive storage platform, EMC's DMX. The GB1000 seemed like a good way to free up that storage at a very low price point. The low power consumption and affordable replacement hardware also made it anattractive tier 4 storage platform.”

For the project, Luke rebuilt the GB1000 with software RAID and Fedora Core 4, and now uses the storage unit as a samba file server. “It has been quite stable and, if the reliability continues to be good, we will certainly consider purchasing more of these for Tier 4 storage.”

For Mission Hospitals and any organization looking to cost-effectively migrate data from expensive legacy systems, Capricorn Technologies is a logical choice. Systems administrators and storage professionals look to Capricorn’s GB series to deliver low-cost, high-density, scaleable, and reliable storage that can safely and securely serve nearline storage requirements. The low price not only includes the cost of entry, but also the ongoing costs to house and maintain a box over its lifetime. For data centers with space constraints that are experiencing soaring energy costs, using boxes that consume very little electricity and dissipate very little heat so cooling costs are minimized is a really interesting and cost-performing proposition.