VARs Face Hurdles In Consolidating Hospitals' Storage

Hospitals traditionally distribute their storage requirements for each department and application, and combining the storage is a role for VARs, said Dan Carson, vice president of marketing and business development at Open Systems Solutions, a Yardley, Pa.-based storage solution provider.

"Consolidating some of that storage can save a hospital hundreds of thousands of dollars," Carson said. "That's the savings they see when not buying storage for new applications. They can save $20,000 to $30,000 here and $20,000 to $30,000 there."

One challenge is that hospitals' storage needs are served in large part by vendors of Picture Archiving and Communications Systems (PACS). PACS vendors typically sell storage devices with their applications in tight, proprietary bundles, which makes it difficult for most solution providers to deal with their related storage. However, many hospitals want to consolidate their non-PACS-related storage, and solution providers can fill this role, said Kip Lindberg, vice president of enterprise sales at Ncell Systems, a Minnetonka, Minn.-based solution provider.

Lindberg noted that even if a PACS application is bundled with a widely available storage array from EMC, Hitachi Data Systems or another manufacturer, it is difficult to consolidate such storage. For instance, a hospital with a big HDS array may not be able to use it for a PACS application, he said, as vendors often limit the types of devices that work with their products.

Warranties are another issue when consolidating, said Carl Wolfston, director of Headlands Associates, a Pleasanton, Calif.-based storage solution provider. Vendors often say they cannot guarantee the reliability of data if it is not accessed from the storage devices they included with the application, which can be troublesome in hospitals with different storage systems and applications in each department, he said.

Keith Norbie, business solutions manager for Nexus Information Systems, a Plymouth, Minn.-based solution provider, said hospitals are showing an increasing interest in standardization of their storage infrastructures. However, he said there is still a lot of chaos in those infrastructures, and he assigns blame largely to the manufacturers, saying they have been happy to sell separate pools of storage to go with their applications.

Solution providers that are consolidating hospitals' non-PACS storage rely on a variety of methods.

Ncell uses virtualization and works with IBM's SAN Volume Controller storage virtualization appliance to combine storage pools. "A lot of hospitals already have IBM in their infrastructures," Lindberg said.

Open Systems calls on its expertise in database applications such as Oracle and SQL to consolidate databases to a single storage pool, even without in-depth knowledge of the hospital's specific applications, Carson said.

"You need to know the SAN," he said. "You need knowledge of the database to optimize its performance. We have a professional services unit inside our company to go in and do that."

Open Systems uses storage management software from CommVault Systems to consolidate such storage capacity. "It has a strong hierarchical storage management component on the back end," Carson said.

Once storage is consolidated, any storage device no longer needed can be redeployed. "So if the hospital gets a new application, they may not need new storage to go with it," he said.

To make consolidation work, Norbie said it is important to become a hospital's trusted adviser.

"It often comes down to your relationship with the CIO," he said. "ISVs often target the CIO, saying they have this application and that support. So you have to have good relations with the CIOs, and get there before the ISVs do. ... The most successful salespeople are there two to three times a week."

For some storage-centric VARs, another way into the medical vertical is to work with software providers to develop complete solutions that address the unique storage needs of hospitals.

Michael Fanelli, western regional manager of SSI hubcity, Metuchen, N.J., said his company is currently looking for a software partner in the hospital space. "Hospitals want their storage infrastructures to work seamlessly," he said. "A lot of time, vendors want customers to adopt [the vendor's] business models. But hospitals won't."

In the long term, there is hope in the channel to eventually be able to consolidate PACS storage with other storage as well, because hospitals will demand that capability, Lindberg said.

"[PACS vendors] don't believe in open systems," he said. "They say there's no warranty. But eventually they'll have to crack. And that's where the real storage opportunity is."