Geisinger Health Systems upgraded its IT environment with a Sun StorageTek tape solution that strengthened the organization's regulatory compliance while improving performance and data integrity at its primary and remote datacenter sites. The new backup and recovery solution stores and encrypts healthcare records from its mainframe system for more than two million patients.

A three-phase upgrade to Geisinger's existing Sun StorageTek infrastructure was instituted with help from Sun Professional Services which provided project management and implementation services.

The first phase consisted of replacing its Virtual Storage Manager (VSM) 3.0 system with a 1.25 TB VSM 4.0 system. The second phase added two (one 330-, one 200-slot) Sun StorageTek SL3000 modular library systems that use a combination of high-throughput, encryption-ready StorageTek T10000 and T9840D FICON tape drives. To meet the new requirement for data encryption, two clustered Sun StorageTek Crypto Key Management Station (KMS) 2.0 appliances were also installed. The KMS appliances encrypt and decrypt data written by the SL3000 library's T10000 tape drives. Following completion of Geisinger's remote datacenter seven miles away and for phase three, Sun helped move one SL3000 library and one KMS cluster to the new facility for backup and restore. The hardware is protected by a SunSpectrum support agreement. The project was successfully finished on time in June 2009.

With its upgrade in place, Geisinger can now meet regulatory requirements for transporting encrypted data, and it reports performance gains as well. For example, the time for backing up all of Geisinger's core volumes onto a StorageTek T10000 drive decreased by approximately 30 percent. The organization is also using the solution's high-availability and management features, which include local and remote monitoring software, to better protect data integrity.

"The transition to the new StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager was seamless," stated Phyllis Kernan, systems engineer/team leader for Mainframe Systems at Geisinger Health System. "We were able to facilitate the transition to the new StorageTek SL3000 tape libraries by adding them to the existing configuration and migrating data from our legacy StorageTek libraries while also writing new data to the SL3000 libraries."

More Information

Customer Snapshot: Geisinger Health System

Sun StorageTek SL3000 Modular Library System

Sun StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager System

Sun StorageTek Crypto Key Management Station 2.0

Sun StorageTek T10000 Tape Drive

Sun StorageTek T9840D Tape Drive

Sun StorageTek Implementation Services

Sun Support Services [...read more...]

		fullsource
Print Email Current Profile Archive Blog Generate newsletter