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I recently had the honour to present at the 2014 CIO Healthcare Summit in Dallas, Texas. It was an opportunity to discuss the concerns of CIOs and IT managers in the healthcare industry, and the challenges they face in meeting data and storage demands ahead.

OVERCOMING STORAGE BOTTLENECKS
The healthcare industry is being transformed by a mandated move from paper to electronic medical records (EMR), and regulatory compliance requirements. And as the world of healthcare moves towards this digital data infrastructure, it finds that existing storage systems simply aren't able to deliver the performance required for large data sets, analysing massive medical record data, or quickly retrieving high-resolution diagnostic images.

When hospitals receive patient information from other sources, such as an insurance company or other medical facility, the data received is often very large and structured very differently from how physicians or lab data is systemised in-house. Analysing this large, semi-structured or unstructured data puts a great strain on storage I/O operation, which is the bottleneck of current spinning hard drive-based infrastructure.

The problem is that while various compute resources have improved exponentially over the past years, disk drive performance has steadily degraded (access density). In fact, with all these advancements in technology, hard drive storage has become a bottleneck that's actually slowing down applications. If we look at the data chain, a typical server processor can read data out of main memory at 100 nanoseconds, but it takes about 500,000 times that long to read data off the disk - that's a huge delay! And if you multiply this for every patient record and data set that needs to be accessed simultaneously, healthcare IT is finding its storage coming to a screeching halt.

TRANSFORMING HEALTHCARE IT
Recently, Redmond Magazine in the US wrote about the rise of SSDs in data centres, taking a look at the solutions implemented by one of SanDisk Enterprise's customers, the Middle Tennessee Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT) Clinic. No matter how much memory and CPU resources were in the server, their application was constrained by the bottleneck of spinning disk-based storage system that could not retrieve the electronic medical records (EMR) data fast enough, leaving both the healthcare providers and patients frustrated.

Like many other institutions, the Middle Tennessee ENT Clinic found their solution by enhancing their IT infrastructure with flash-based storage and solid-state drives (SSDs). With SSDs delivering greater than 100x the performance of spinning drives, they are able to eliminate the bottleneck created by legacy hard drives. And as data sets such as CT scans and medical records continue to grow at a rapid pace, SSDs can help data centres to scale performance with less infrastructure - which translates to less maintenance, floor space, electricity and overall costs.

Flash storage solutions are not 'one-size fits all', and our ability to design and control flash-based technology delivers an array of solutions tailored for performance needs, workload type or budget constraints.

For example, to gain more efficiency while still keeping some of their legacy infrastructure (no one likes a data centre forklift!), the Middle Tennessee ENT Clinic implemented SanDisk's FlashSoft software. FlashSoft intelligently places hot data (i.e. data that's frequently accessed) on SSDs as the server cache, enabling the clinic to have rapid access to currently retrieved records in their EMR system.

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