CareGroup Healthcare System, which includes Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, has tackled the stress that the growing number of applications was placing on its network – and on its IT team.

Today the healthcare system is looking ahead to what CareGroup’s storage architect Michael Passe calls “true storage service management” to keep continuous watch over the network and all the applications.

Over the past six years CareGroup storage area network (SAN) requirements grew by nearly 2,500 percent, with increases of up to 200 percent during certain years due to the introduction of new applications and the adoption of an information lifecycle management strategy.

It was enough to keep Passe up at night. It certainly kept him at work late, poring over Excel spreadsheets. For about a year now, the process has been automated, using software from Boston-based Onaro. It has meant many a good night’s sleep for Passe and no down time – no brown-outs – for the health system’s network and applications.

The network has to be available all the time, said Passe, “especially in patient care.”
Enterprise Strategy Group founder and senior analyst, Steve Duplessie, agrees. "Application outages and data loss can be catastrophic events when medical staff cannot access critical information to diagnose patients and prescribe treatment, he said. “Onaro's SANscreen can help eliminate an inordinate amount of downtime, which can directly lead to saving lives.”

With more than 13,000 employees, 2,000 medical professionals and an IT staff of more than 200, CareGroup offers a broad spectrum of health services to residents of Eastern Massachusetts in a variety of settings. Using Onaro’s SANscreen, CareGroup's storage engineers have created a sequence of steps they take in order to implement a specific change and then simulate those steps to predict the impact on the network.

This enables SANscreen to automate, control and accelerate CareGroup's entire SAN change management process, instead of using error-prone manual processes, and it frees up Passe and his team to focus on how best to use the healthcare system’s IT resources as opposed to working on time-consuming troubleshooting.

“From the host level to the disk level and everything in between, including network backup and software-related issues, our SAN presents a major management challenge," said Passe.  “It was very important to get a handle on our storage environment early, before it got too complex. We can now visualize, verify and simulate planned changes – understanding their impact across our entire SAN.”

“We give you a view to verify it’s working correctly,” said Bryan Semple, vice president of marketing for Onaro. “We tell you if things are working or not.” While more healthcare systems are coming around to automating this process, Semple said CareGroup is clearly ahead of most healthcare organizations. Many are still using the Excel method of tracking applications and changes, he said.

Passe said it took less than 24-hours to fully deploy the SANScreen due to its non-invasive, agent-less architecture, and CareGroup received a return on investment in the first month, he said.