Tag: all-flash storage

Pure Storage: Why All-Flash storage is the next Critical Step for PACS and VNA Solutions

Arby News and Events , , , , , , , , , ,
Pure Storage: Why All-Flash storage is the next Critical Step for PACS and VNA Solutions

Presently, Healthcare organizations are becoming more reliant on their enterprise imaging systems to improve their overall quality of service they provide to their clients.  However, as growth in size and scope continues for imaging, those responsible for constructing and managing the Picture Archiving Communication Systems (PACS) and Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA) solutions will have to handle various new and potentially difficult challenges.  However, within these challenges lies opportunities to improve patient care with storage upgrades to support the PACS and VNA solutions.

Challenges

With major advances in both imaging technology and information technology, clinicians now have the means to use a broader range of images from across the entire health system to make better and informed decisions when it comes to their clients care.  Also, as the system continues to expand in size and scope, more advanced analytics will be available to improve the progress of treating patients.

This means administrators of PACS and VNA play a bigger role, making sure delivery of performance to the point of care and meeting more stringent requirements for images, including availability, business continuity and compliance.  This means dealing with capacity growth while making sure that images are readily available and not stored in an archive that is inaccessible or unable to meet the performance requirements of the image and viewer.  They must also align their systems to their customer needs, be it current or future customers.

How all-flash storage can help

Legacy spinning disk arrays do not have the performance level to meet the demands of today’s enterprise imaging solutions unless they are replaced or upgraded.  Hybrid systems have been tried by some organizations using flash as cache or as one of several storage tiers.  However these solutions failed to deliver consistent performance needed for the PACS and VNA systems making it very difficult on the part of the administrators during its operations.  This makes it clear that to optimally run these systems, single-tiered all-flash storage solutions is the only viable option.  Below are some of the key benefits in using an all flash array

Simplified manageability

An all-flash array will typically mean faster deployments, simpler scaling and less complex ongoing management and maintenance. With the right all-flash platform, administrators can use automation to eliminate a wide range of manual tasks— with no need to ever undertake an expensive and risky forklift upgrade.

A single storage tier

This is valuable from a number of perspectives. In terms of performance, using a single tier of high-performance storage means that images are always available and on storage that can ensure quick and easy access. In terms of manageability, a single tier eliminates manual processes and the myriad tasks involved in managing the cache. In terms of cost effectiveness, a single storage tier means no need to manage archives and older storage platforms that are becoming obsolete.

A future-proof infrastructure

All-flash storage is clearly the future for PACS and VNA systems, so there is really no point in waiting. With all-flash storage, PACS and VNA systems can deliver major improvements in performance, agility, availability and manageability. With the right solution, administrators can stay current with the latest technology without having to replace infrastructure and migrate applications, images and data. In addition, flash storage is the only storage platform that can deliver the performance required for modern initiatives such as big data analytics, machine learning and radiomics.

To learn more about PACS and VNA solutions with Pure Storage, you may check this link here.  If you want to learn more about all-flash storage, you can visit our Pure Storage product page or contact us directly at 893-9515.

Manage your Data and Analyze your Data Effortlessly and Efficiently with Pure Storage and Oracle®

Arby News and Events , , , , , , , , , ,
Manage your Data and Analyze your Data Effortlessly and Efficiently with Pure Storage and Oracle®

In today’s business, storing data properly has become business critical.  Analyzing the right data against other data types (internal or by global standards) can be key in improving your business and putting it in the right direction.  This process is known as Digital Transformation.  To begin the transformation, companies must be able to store, access and analyze their data efficiently and as fast as possible so that they can gain insights before their competition does.  Just asked yourself, are you analyzing your business data like customer support emails or their chat logs?  If not it would be best if you started now before your competitors do.  Below is a simple guide to mapping your data with data management application Oracle®:

  1. Data value starts with operational data (transactions), structured data stored in Oracle® Database.
  2. Data becomes more valuable with the addition of data warehousing and business intelligence to provide descriptive analysis of your business based on historical data.
  3. Data value is greatest when you combine all of your data assets — structured and unstructured — to gather predictive and prescriptive analytics from different sources, such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and other application data to fully participate in the era of digital transformation.

Below are ways in which Pure Storage can help your infrastructure make Oracle® effortless and efficient when analyzing your data:

Simplicity

  • All-flash solutions take half as long to deploy as other storage solutions and with Pure Storage’s solution, you can be sure of its simplicity and validity as they have been fully tested and validated.
  • Fast and efficient Pure Storage snapshots let you automate the copy, clone, and refresh processes of an Oracle® database and reduce the time to copy and clone up to 90%.
  • Pure Storage solutions let you run Oracle® databases for development, test, quality assurance (QA), and production for online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) workloads on the same Pure Storage platform.

 

Data Reduction

  • Pure Storage solutions include both in-line lossless deduplication and compression for ultimate data reduction, which can help data reduction of 3 – 5 times the conventional Oracle® data types — such as number, date, char, and varchar.
  • By running your Oracle® solutions on Pure Storage, you not only compress data to lower its footprint and reduce storage needs, you also do away with the need for Oracle® compression.

Performance

  • Pure Storage all-flash solutions improve performance by orders of magnitude, with sub-millisecond latency, no disruptions, and no effect on performance for upgrades or maintenance.
  • Pure Storage uses flash instead of disks, which eliminates the performance delays caused by the inherent latency of disk storage, which means you can run Oracle® OLTP and OLAP solutions in parallel on the same Pure Storage all-flash storage platform.

Click here to learn more about Pure Storage on Oracle®, to learn more about Pure Storage visit our product page or contact us at 893-9515!

Migrate your Business to SAP HANA with the affordable SAP HANA Dynamic Tiering

Arby News and Events , , , , , , ,
Migrate your Business to SAP HANA with the affordable SAP HANA Dynamic Tiering

What is SAP HANA?

Deployable on premise or in the cloud, SAP HANA is an in-memory data platform that lets you accelerate business processes, deliver more business intelligence, and simplify your IT environment. By providing the foundation for all your data needs, SAP HANA removes the burden of maintaining separate legacy systems and siloed data, so you can run live and make better business decisions in the new digital economy.

In summary, your company will be able to simplify its IT with one platform for trans-analytic applications.  This means that you will be able to analyze live data to support real-time business while at the same time reduce data redundancy, hardware and IT operations.  You will also be able to modernize your data centre with flexible SAP HANA deployment options, be it public or private cloud.  With SAP HANA, some companies are seeing 575% five-year  ROI by increasing innovation and decreasing data management costs.

If SAP HANA is so beneficial, why is it not a standard?

Even with all the business benefits that SAP HANA can provide, it is still placed on a company’s wish list rather than their next purchase.  Why you may ask?  Price.  The expense for an initial migration project for SAP HANA can cost the company over $2 million when things such as deployment, staff, hardware and licensing are considered.  Even with all its benefits, it is very hard to justify anything with that kind of cost behind it.  However, it is projected that by 2025 that SAP HANA will be a must have business solution, whether or not the company can justify the expense.  You must also take into consideration that just because your company is not getting SAP HANA that your competition will not.

Here is where SAP HANA Dynamic Tiering on an all-flash infrastructure comes in.  Be able to migrate to SAP HANA and gain the benefits of its real-time insights almost immediately without paying the potentially limiting upfront and ongoing costs.

S AP HANA Dynamic Tiering is an add-on for the SAP HANA database.  It allows less frequently used data (warm data) to be moved from the main in-memory SAP HANA database into extended storage.  Using extended storage can dramatically reduce costs by decreasing the size of the SAP HANA database – thereby lowering maintenance, hardware, and software/licensing costs.  When the extended storage is an all-flash infrastructure, performance loss can be minimized compared to keeping all date in SAP HANA itself.

Pure Storage tested the cost and performance impacts of running SAP HANA with SAP HANA Dynamic Tiering on their Pure Storage FlashStack converged-infrastructure solution to see if it was possible to save organizations millions of dollars while still being able to realize all of its benefits.  The results?  Organizations that run SAP HANA with SAP HANA Dynamic Tiering on Pure Storage’s all-flash infrastructure were able to quickly and easily start using SAP HANA at a lower cost (up to 75% lower) while still obtaining performance on par as if running SAP HANA on its own.  As a bonus, with Pure Storage all-flash solution and Pure Storage’s collaboration with SAP, organizations will be ready and able to reduce the overall in-memory data footprint and offload less frequently used war data on to all-flash technology while still obtaining high performance with future SAP HANA capabilities, be it the capabilities of SAP HANA Dynamic Tiering or something else.

To learn more about the Pure Storage test, please read this article for a more in-depth study.  If you want to learn more about Pure Storage, you can visit our product page or call us at 893-9515.