Wellmont Health System is the premier provider of healthcare services for NortheastTennessee, Southwest Virginia, and Southeast Kentucky. It encompasses a network of13 owned and affiliated hospitals dedicated to delivering top-quality, comprehensivehealthcare and wellness services across the Tri-State region.

With a national reputation for safety, Wellmont Health System relies on an advanced ITinfrastructure designed to facilitate 24x7 access to patient information throughout itsnetwork to support the highest quality of care possible.

The organization’s dynamic IT infrastructure spans three data centers linked togetheracross an enterprise network via Course Wavelength Division Multiplexing (CDWM) tech-nology over dark fiber. This facilitates connectivity to a four Gigabit Ethernet backboneand an eight Gigabit Fibre Channel network.

Multiple tiers of EMC storage, representing over 500 terabytes of capacity, reside withinWellmont Health System’s three data centers. This tiered storage approach enables theorganization’s IT team to provision the right kind of storage to accommodate differentapplication service-level needs for the highest efficiency possible—all while ensuringnon-stop access to information by those entrusted with patient care. A pair of EMC®

Connectrix® (Cisco MDS 9000 family) directors at both the Kingsport corporate data center(CORP) and the Bristol Regional Medical Center data center (BRMC), along with two EMCConnectrix switches at the Holston Valley Medical Center (HVMC) form a high-performance,highly reliable eight Gigabit ring of connectivity between the sites.

“EMC is our single source for integrated, SAN, NAS, archiving, and disaster recovery solu-tions,” says Rex Lewis, senior SAN/UNIX engineer. “We partnered with EMC to initiatebest practices supported by industry-leading storage solutions to successfully and cost-effectively meet our diverse healthcare information management requirements.”

High performance and availability for mission-critical applicationsSix years ago, the organization switched from a direct-attached storage environmentto a centralized EMC Symmetrix® storage infrastructure. Today, two new mirrored EMCSymmetrix DMX™ systems successfully support the organization’s most-critical applica-tions, providing unsurpassed access speeds and continuous availability. Applications

EMC tiered-storage, disaster recovery, and servervirtualization solutions support healthcare system’sgrowing information management requirements

Customer Profile

Wellmont Health System

requiring these stringent service levels include the organization’s McKesson family ofhealth information systems, a Microsoft Server environment, Misys applications, and anAgfa PACS. The organization’s VMware® environment, including the virtual operatingsystems and storage necessary to run applications supported by these virtual servers, isalso accommodated by Symmetrix DMX storage.

Advanced EMC ControlCenter® software tools, such as Symmetrix Optimizer and PerformanceManager are used to streamline storage management tasks. Symmetrix Optimizer is runon a regular basis to provide the information necessary to adjust the environment to sup-port the most effective utilization of storage resources.

“We let Symmetrix Optimizer show us where the hot spots are on the physical disks, andthen pick from the recommendations on what we’d like to move,” explains Lewis. “Thenice thing is that it lets us move things around to better accommodate capacity require-ments without impacting users. The servers and applications stay up and runningthroughout the process.”

EMC Performance Manager is used to monitor utilization rates over time. The generationof monthly storage metrics reports allows the organization to proactively plan for theresources necessary to address future needs.

“A key benefit of this software is that it provides us with enough information to doplanned hardware upgrades,” says Lewis.

Supplying an industry-leading disaster recovery solution for this patient-critical infra-structure, EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF®) software also helps meet businesscontinuity requirements for internal and external regulations. EMC SRDF automaticallymirrors data from the EMC Symmetrix DMX system located within the CORP data centerto the other Symmetrix DMX system housed within the BRMC data center 38 miles away.

“SRDF is the lynchpin of our disaster recovery plan and allows for real-time data replication,”states Darren Ramsey, director of Technical Services. “In the event of a disaster at the pri-mary data center we can recover patient-critical systems and e-mail in less than one hour.”

Further boosting performance and reliability, EMC PowerPath® management softwareprovides advanced multi-pathing, load-balancing, and failover capabilities betweenservers and Symmetrix storage throughout Wellmont Health System’s IT environment.

Expansion made easyRecently, the high capacity and inherent flexibility of the organization’s EMC SymmetrixDMX platform played an important role in facilitating a necessary upgrade to its McKessonfamily of health information systems. Engaged to do the migration, McKesson’s Tech-nology Service Group (TSG) estimated the process would require 20 hours of downtimeto back up the data, bring the system down, migrate the data, and bring the system upagain. However, through Wellmont Health System’s “pay-as-you-grow” lease with EMC,

“EMC is our single source for integrated, SAN, NAS, archiving, and disaster recoverysolutions. We partnered with EMC to initiate best practices supported by industry-leading storage solutions to successfully and cost-effectively meet our diversehealthcare information management requirements.”

Rex Lewis, Senior SAN/UNIX Engineer

the organization’s IT team was able to offer an alternative migration plan that wouldrequire less than two-and-a-half hours of downtime.

By providing the McKesson migration team with LUNs on the Symmetrix and connectinganother server to those LUNs, data could easily be migrated to the new LUNs. Then, duringthe period when the servers were brought down, the LUNs and servers could be quicklyswapped. This approach resulted in a swift and successful migration, and now allows forbetter support of a rapidly growing database.

“The EMC leasing program allowed us to start with a capacity base on the DMX and payas we grow into the buffer area,” explains Lewis. “This gives us the flexibility to expandas we need it rather than budget for it all up front which can sometimes be difficult. Asa result, we were able to immediately tap into that additional storage capacity to accom-modate the McKesson upgrade and to make it happen in just a few hours.”

NAS and SAN support in one systemTwo EMC Celerra® NS704 Series Gateway IP storage systems with dual data movers andEMC CLARiiON® storage on the back end now enable Wellmont Health System to consolidateboth block and file tier-two and tier-three storage assets onto a single, highly reliable, andscalable modular storage array. These cutting-edge systems reside within both CORPand BRMC data centers.

The NAS file server component of the solution supports all of the organization’s homedirectories for its 6,000 users, which are stored on the CLARiiON arrays. Set up in primary/standby mode, dual data movers in each NS704 Series Gateway system ensure failovercapability for high availability at each site. EMC Celerra Replicator™ software is used tosupport IP replication between the sites.

EMC CLARiiON CX storage at the BRMC site provides a cost-effective, yet highly reliableshort-term cache repository for Wellmont Health System’s Agfa PACS “Fast Cache,” whichhouses a year’s worth of studies on ATA drives. This system safeguards PACS imagesgenerated from across the enterprise while accommodating the immediate informationaccess needs of the organization’s radiologists. Additionally, the CLARiiON CX storage atboth BRMC and CORP sites is leveraged to provide backup pools to store local backupsfor each site. Backup is facilitated by IBM Tivoli Storage Manager software.

“This process gives us a much faster way of storing backups instead of going directly toslow tape,” states Lewis. “We send them to a temporary disk pool on the CLARiiON andthen at some point the Tivoli Storage Manager software goes in and migrates that dataoff to tape.”

Plans to replace the organization’s existing overflowing tape library with a more cost-efficient virtual tape library solution are underway. EMC Disk Library systems have beenacquired for both HVMC and BRMC data centers to support rapid backups facilitated byIBM Tivoli Storage Manager software.

EMC Disk Library technology has enabled Wellmont Health System to avoid the purchaseof six new LT03 tape drives, two additional Tivoli Storage Manager servers, and 200 addi-tional tapes for a total cost of $250,000. Instead, those funds have been invested towardthe purchase of EMC Disk Library systems which will provide a cost-efficient, long-termsolution designed to improve backup service-level objectives and business restore capa-bilities, as well as position the organization for complete tape elimination.

“Our plan is to initially have 75 terabytes of data on each library,” says Lewis. “Eventuallywe hope to replicate the data between the two systems which will enable us to eliminate

tape backups altogether. It will also eliminate the need to use our CLARiiON resources forbackup which will help conserve our tier-two resources and extend our investment there.We expect the solution to provide a cost-effective approach to storing our growing data.”

An advanced solution for online archivesProviding cost-efficient, bi-directionally replicated online archive repositories, EMC Centera®

systems at HVMC and BRMC facilities deliver rapid access, content authenticity, and peta-byte scalability to fully accommodate the organization’s growing demand for archivalstorage for key applications including those from Agfa, docSTAR, Eleckta, Emageon, GEHealthcare, McKesson, Microsoft Exchange, and Philips.

An EMC Centera Universal Access (CUA) software appliance enables the organization’snon-integrated Windows and UNIX enterprise applications to store and retrieve contentfrom EMC Centera using CIFS and NFS protocols. A second “standby” CUA brings enhancedavailability to the environment by facilitating the transition of the standby CUA to an activestate if the active CUA fails.

Facilitating automatic records backup, new Agfa PACS images are committed to CLARiiONand EMC Centera at the same time. Historical images previously stored on optical diskshave been transferred directly to the EMC Centera system which now provides a safe andeconomical online archive repository for past and present images.

In the old environment, retrieving historical studies took considerable time and effort. Ifa radiologist needed to compare a current image with one taken several years ago, a callhad to be made to an operator who would have to search through shelves of optical disksin the computer room to find the right one and mount it in the jukebox to provide access.

“By having the data stored on the EMC Centera, radiologists can now access historicalstudies within seconds with no operator involved,” says Lewis.

Through the use of EMC DiskXtender®, which supports automated file system archiving,and EMC EmailXtender® software, which provides e-mail management capabilities, allMicrosoft Exchange messages are archived to EMC Centera as they are processed by thee-mail system. EmailXtender stores single copies of messages and attachments anduses compression for maximum storage efficiency. E-mail attachments over thirty daysold are removed from the Exchange store and replaced with shortcuts, thereby reducingdemands on the e-mail server. With the use of an Outlook plug-in, archived messagesthat have been deleted from the Exchange store can be retrieved by users themselveswith no IT intervention.

“EmailXtender has saved us a lot of time and money,” says Lewis. “Without it we wouldhave had to add more tier-one storage and/or go to tape which requires a more costlyand time-consuming process to create and store the tapes or recover messages andattachments from them.”

“SRDF is the lynchpin of our disaster recovery plan and allows for realtime datareplication. In the event of a disaster at the primary data center we can recoverpatient-critical systems and e-mail in less than one hour.”

Darren Ramsey, Director of Technical Services

EMC DiskXtender is also used to move McKesson records older than 60 days from theSymmetrix DMX system to EMC Centera. In addition, EMC DiskXtender, UNIX/Linux, DataManager for Celerra will soon be deployed to reduce the amount of CLARiiON storagerequired for the organization’s home directories. DiskXtender will be used to automati-cally move data that hasn’t been accessed for six months or longer, as defined by reten-tion policies, out to EMC Centera archives.

Of added benefit with regard to effective management of this archival environment, EMCCentera Seek and EMC Centera Chargeback Reporter software solutions generate monthlyreports on EMC Centera resource consumption rates.

“Although we don’t use these tools for chargeback, we do let people know how much EMCCentera storage they are consuming,” says Lewis. “The software helps us project whenwe will need to buy more storage.”

A virtual server environment further improves operationalefficienciesPrior to Wellmont Health System’s adoption of VMware server virtualization technology, theorganization had approximately 250 physical servers in operation supporting its clinical andbusiness applications. Faced with rapidly diminishing floor space and power resources,the organization turned again to EMC solutions. Facilitating substantial consolidation,12 VMware ESX servers are now in place running virtual machines for 130 different appli-cations which previously ran on their own separate physical servers.

“VMware has enabled us to operate much more efficiently,” says John Wininger, SystemsEngineer II. “It has also given us the flexibility to quickly provision new servers as neededand make resource adjustments as demands grow.”

VMware VMotion® software, which allows for the non-disruptive movement of virtualmachines from one physical server to another, has given Wellmont Health System’s tech-nical staff a powerful tool for optimizing the use of server resources and enhancing avail-ability. This capability was put to the test last year when the organization migrated off itsold Symmetrix to the new Symmetrix DMX platform.

“We actually used a new feature in VMware Infrastructure 3,” explains Wininger. “Nor-mally with VMotion you just move memory content, not actual disk data. With the latestVMotion capabilities we were also able to move the disk content without taking theserver offline which enabled us to migrate around 100 servers to the new SAN withoutany downtime.”

VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and High-Availability (HA) solutions arenow being leveraged by the organization as well. With these new solutions, monitoringand adjusting utilization across resource pools and restarting virtual machines in theevent of physical server failure becomes automatic.

VMware technology coupled with EMC SRDF mirroring software has also facilitated morecomprehensive disaster recovery and business continuity capabilities.

“We can now have a physical machine, like an Exchange Server, running at one site and byusing SRDF mirroring capabilities we can actually bring that server up on a virtual machineon standby at another site,” states Wininger.

Another benefit VMware has delivered is simplified lab testing and development.

“Instead of having three or four physical boxes, I can set up a number of virtual machineson one physical server in a matter of minutes,” says Wininger. “VMware has enabled us toeasily do application modeling and load baselining, and has allowed us to emulate entireActive Directory, Exchange, and other Microsoft environments on a single machine.”

An IT environment that supports exceptional patient careWellmont Health System’s integrated, tiered EMC information infrastructure and VMwareserver virtualization capabilities have enhanced the organization’s ability to run IT opera-tions as efficiently as possible, while strengthening the facility’s ability to deliver the safest,most expedient, highest quality healthcare services to the many communities it serves.

“EMC’s broad range of solutions have provided us with a comprehensive, tiered approachto intelligently address our information management challenges,” says Ramsey. “We cannow seamlessly increase our storage resources which is very important given the expo-nential growth of our electronic medical records. EMC’s product reliability and SRDFtechnology have helped us achieve five-nines availability which is vital within the health-care industry. In addition, VMware technology has given us the means to cost-effectivelygrow our virtual server farms to quickly accommodate new applications while enablingus to conserve data center space and reduce power and cooling demands.”

EMC CorporationHopkintonMassachusetts01748-91031-508-435-1000In North America 1-866-464-7381

EMC2, EMC, EMC Centera, EMC ControlCenter, Celerra, Centera, CLARiiON, Connectrix, DiskXtender, EmailXtender, PowerPath, SRDF, Symmetrix, and where information lives are registered trademarks and Celerra Replicator, and Symmetrix DMX are trademarks of EMCCorporation. VMware and VMotion are registeredtrademarks of VMware, Inc. All other trademarksused herein are the property of their respectiveowners.

© Copyright 2007 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Published in the USA. 11/07

Customer ProfileH4080

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