Storage Efficiency with Virtualization

Executive Summary

Overview
Universitaire Ziekenhuizen Leuven (University Hospitals Leuven or UZ Leuven) is the largest hospital in Belgium and one of the largest healthcare providers in Europe, with four sites, more than 2,000 beds, and more than 8,500 employees. It provides primary care for residents of the city of Leuven, and its specialty clinics treat patients from all over Belgium. It is widely known for its high quality of medical care and advanced medical technology. An IT staff of 100 supports more than 12,000 users, 6,000 PCs, and 1,500 printers. The staff also supports the technology needs of several other medical facilities in Belgium. Two data centers on the UZ Leuven campus, at opposite ends of one large building, are supplemented by one offsite center. UZ Leuven has been a NetApp customer since 2000, and by 2008 its entire NetApp® storage infrastructure was virtualized. UZ Leuven currently has more than 800 terabytes of raw storage capacity on NetApp® hardware.

Barriers
UZ Leuven had more than 300 physical servers in its data centers, representing a significant investment in financial and staff resources. Moving to a virtual server environment provided great benefits to UZ Leuven’s IT and medical staffs by lowering costs and improving productivity, but because those servers relied on direct attached storage some challenges remained: backups were slow and depended on human intervention, and they required large amounts of costly storage space. IT was unable to respond quickly to changing needs in the hospital because the servers’ direct attached storage wasn’t flexible, scalable, or quickly adaptable to new requirements. Efficiency suffered because the infrastructure required human intervention for many routine tasks.

The Solution
In 2004, UZ Leuven started the transition to server virtualization, and with the adoption of VMware 3.0 in 2006 it connected its virtual servers to NetApp storage. As the virtual server environment expanded and changed, the unified architecture of UZ Leuven’s NetApp storage grew and adapted with it. The total amount of storage more than doubled—from less than 400 terabytes in 2006 to more than 800 terabytes today—and the connection between virtual servers and storage changed from the iSCSI protocol to NFS, all without costly upgrades or storage hardware replacements.

Having NetApp storage for its virtual servers has allowed UZ Leuven to use NetApp technologies such as SnapshotTM, SnapVault, SnapMirror®, and Protection Manager®. The hospital has effectively eliminated the backup window, dramatically reduced the amount of disk space required for backups, and consolidated and centralized backup management.

Benefits
The technology solutions from NetApp produced tangible business value for UZ Leuven. The Alchemy Solutions Group conducted a Total Operational and Economic Impact (TOEI™) analysis of the UZ Leuven environment and identified realized and projected business value totaling more than $1.35 million USD in four areas from June 2004 through December 2009:
• Storage Management Productivity Gains: $496,900 USD in productivity gains in the IT department because of fewer staff hours required to manage storage from January 2005 through December 2009
• Storage Savings Derived from Deduplication: $293,794 USD in storage savings from using NetApp® deduplication from January 2008 through December 2009
• Helpdesk Labor Productivity Gains: $230,684 USD in productivity gains on the helpdesk because of fewer staff hours required to retrieve files from backup from June 2004 through December 2009
• Data Center Cost Management: Cost savings of $578,889 USD in server and storage hardware, network devices, and power consumption through December 2008

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