Driving Action in Healthcare with NAS Storage

This blog series on Network Attached Storage (NAS) looks under the hood of the latest tech in file services & storage and dives into how enterprises can skyrocket efficiency with NAS.

Click the link for the first six posts.

This article continues our series examining the digital transformation trends in different industries. In previous issues we discussed sectors like finance and manufacturing, and today we’ll focus on how digital transformation is revolutionizing healthcare.

Digital transformation challenges to overcome

At the core of every digital transformation overhaul is digital tech. Over the last decade, cutting-edge technology has fueled innovations in the healthcare industry, supporting the growth of e-workflows and high-quality medical services. Smart hospitals will be at the core of connected healthcare ecosystems, but current development levels are inadequate. Pain points like resource waste, information silos, and other issues limit the ability to mine or share data and prevent effective monitoring and diagnosis.

Next-gen IT systems in healthcare

Many in the healthcare industry need to restructure or even overhaul existing IT infrastructure to meet challenges with data growth and service quality. Hospital informatization refers to upgrading the Hospital Information System (HIS) – a common model centered on hospital management – to a Clinical Information System (CIS) model designed specifically for clinical data. This shift will be the catalyst for a Global Medical Information Service (GMIS) system, in which data and resources can be aggregated, integrated, and shared between medical consortiums and hospitals and their cloud-based big data platforms (data lakes).

Understanding digital hospital systems

A digital hospital system is a comprehensive information system comprising hospital service software, medical equipment, and IT platforms. Hospitals undergoing a digital revolution will better integrate resources, optimize processes, reduce operating expenses, and improve the quality of services and management tasks. Digital hospitals operate an intelligent framework that safeguards sensitive data across HIS and laboratory, radiology, and electronic health record systems, while delivering image resource pools to the picture archiving and communication system (PACS) and big data and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions to other environments. 

Healthcare with Huawei NAS storage

The IT analyst firm Evaluator Group conducted tests on the Huawei OceanStor Dorado NAS system and determined it offers an incredible high throughput rate for medical imaging workloads. Equipped with the industry-leading FlashLink algorithms, the Huawei all-flash storage system delivers 30% higher OPS performance than peer products. Moreover, its innovative global shared distributed file system eliminates controller bottlenecks and balances controller loads to allow access to the same file system.

Consider the following case study:

A top European hospital overhauled its existing setup with a unified platform for its clinical and management information systems running database, virtualization, file sharing, email, forensic video, and office applications. With a 20% YOY increase in data volumes, hospital IT systems are becoming unresponsive, while legacy storage devices have insufficient performance and can’t easily be expanded or store mass data. Because medical professionals are busy with providing medical services and other tasks like teaching and conducting medical research, it is necessary to find time-saving solutions to review medical records and reports.

This is why the hospital upgraded its information systems with OceanStor Dorado, Huawei’s flagship storage product that’s able to respond to different applications thanks to a tiered storage design. SAN storage equipped with high-performance SSDs is used for databases and virtualization platforms, while mailboxes, medical images, and forensic videos are deployed on NAS storage. This setup ensures huge volumes of both structured and unstructured data are effectively stored, reducing O&M costs by an average of 50%.

This solution also streamlines normal operations. SmartQoS ensures optimal quality of different services and provides excellent response to critical services – giving staff more time to spend on more important issues.

Huawei HyperMetro Integrated SAN and NAS Active-Active Solution provides HA for both database and file services, and a premium framework to prevent interruptions to critical services. It is oriented to future growth, supporting the upgrade to geo-redundant 3DC architecture, making it one of the industry’s most robust disaster recovery solutions to date.

Reshaping the Future

Healthcare digitalization is transforming the way healthcare providers are organizing their back-end systems, a result of which is improving front-end services and enabling better use of mass unstructured data (small files) in medical services, scientific research, and management. Equipped with cutting-edge functions, superb performance, and high-reliability features, Huawei OceanStor Dorado NAS is purpose-built to support the development of demanding industries, including healthcare. Huawei Storage invests in future-oriented solutions to provide customers with high-performance and affordable choices that fit their most pressing concerns. This backbone of cooperation in technological innovation has produced one of the most impressive portfolios of industry storage solutions, helping healthcare providers with their digital transformation goals.

Learn how you can build sustainable growth for your business with Huawei OceanStor Dorado All-Flash NAS Storage solutions.

Disclaimer: Any views and/or opinions expressed in this post by individual authors or contributors are their personal views and/or opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views and/or opinions of Huawei Technologies.