INDUSTRY WATCH
UMASS MEMORIAL HEALTH CARE BY NUMBERS :
• 1,700 physicians on its active medical staff
• 3,000 registered nurses
• 14,000 + total employees
• 1,125 beds in its hospitals
only is it much more expensive to support this gear , it can put data at risk .”
The solution
Acknowledging the magnitude and critical importance of the task , Davis and his team carefully researched and evaluated potential solutions .
Davis chose Datadobi , as its DobiMigrate enterprise-class software would enable them to migrate file or object data between any storage platform , on-premises or in the cloud – safely , quickly , easily , and cost effectively .
DobiMigrate made the cutover time seamless and the change management process easy .
“ Change is tough everywhere . But hospitals run on slightly tighter margins ,” said Davis .
“ With DobiMigrate we are able to dry-run a change , see how long it will take and accurately advise other data center team members , as well as those outside of IT that could be affected .”
Migration speed and ease of management were of great importance to Davis . He and his team were impressed with their ability to complete tasks in moments that had previously taken hours .
“ The initial replication is fast , but after DobiMigrate completes it , it is ridiculously fast . You can open as many threads as your network can handle ,” said Davis .
“ Also , it is able to plough through metadata and discover changes in our databases in an incredibly fast and efficient manner .
“ And any kind of error is also a cakewalk . DobiMigrate manages it all , even when users add something as foreign as emojis in the file name . Yes , that actually happens .”
In addition , the fact that DobiMigrate offered a single , multiprotocol supported solution was also a boon .
“ We needed to be able to handle CIFS and SMB protocols , as well as NFS and DobiMigrate delivered ,” said Davis .
Last but not least , DobiMigrate ’ s continuous monitoring capabilities also rated high .
Davis said : “ Hospitals have long-term retention needs . My end-users – caregivers and administrators – need to hold and protect data for years as part of our operations and to meet regulatory requirements , and that can stretch to decades for clinical data .
“ With DobiMigrate we can see what data is being actively used , the exact age of each file , and when it was last touched , down to the department level and user .”
“ DobiMigrate put us ahead of the curve by well over a year . Without it , we would have been running into constant obstacles .”
The future
Not surprisingly , COVID-19 caused new priorities to arise , and UMass Memorial Health Care has had to put the final changeover to the new NetApp infrastructure on hold . To date approximately half the storage , or about 500 TBs , have been migrated to the new NetApp storage . Until the changeover is complete , DobiMigrate is being leveraged to replicate data every three hours .
“ All the departmental shares have been moved but the home directories are still hanging ,” said Davis .
In the coming months , the plan is to complete the migration on to the NetApp and decommission the Isilon . The dated Isilon is currently connected to a variety of equally dated network switches . Once the move is complete , the networking team will be able to decommission the switches as well .
“ Thanks to Datadobi , the storage team has all of our ducks in a row ,” Davis said . “ Once the move is complete , we don ’ t need to make any complicated changes on our old storage here or in our DR site , we can just flip the switch and turn out the lights .” •
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