The healthcare industry presents very specific challenges when it comes to handling data. Managing the sheer volume of sensitive information that needs to be protected, stored, shared across providers, and available for access at a moment’s notice is a daunting task for most healthcare IT departments however, the mandate is clear: increase innovation, support a growing level of data, and reduce costs, all while conforming to HIPAA regulations.

One healthcare company initially addressed the data growth conundrum by leasing data storage equipment. As the renewal date loomed, it no longer made economic or business sense to extend the lease. After a complete analysis, this healthcare leader determined it could reduce costs and improve services by moving to an entirely new data storage architecture rather than upgrade with the current vendor.

From an initial review, meeting the organization’s requirements in the given timeline seemed nearly impossible – install the new storage architecture and migrate the data within three months, all while maintaining HIPAA compliance and with zero impact to operations. If the deadline was missed, a $57K/month fee would be due on the leased equipment. The company’s own IT department forecasted this process would take six to nine months to complete, with the data migration phase being conducted in the off-hours.

Cirrus Data Solutions’ (CDS) storage technology partner, Pure Storage, was selected as the new storage platform for this growing healthcare organization. Working together with Cirrus’ leading services partner, Contour Data Solutions, the Pure and Cirrus teams determined there was a way to make the timeline and budget work while still preserving data integrity and staying within performance requirements.

DMS’ patented TDI technology allowed it to be placed between the host application and the storage back-end platform while the storage was still in production, making the migration transparent to the application team, IT, operations, and most importantly the healthcare clients. DMS’ intelligent QoS (iQoS) function monitored the data path to determine the real-time data and network requirements, and automatically paused the data migration process when the host application traffic was congested. It then resumed the migration at full speed when it was certain there would be no negative impact to production traffic. This unique capability of DMS enabled a much shorter migration timeline.

This was Contour Data Solutions’ first time experiencing the benefits of implementing a data migration with purpose-built technology. After harnessing DMS and witnessing firsthand the value it added, Contour decided to make DMS a requirement for any data migration project it conducted in the future.

DMS allows storage migration partners to easily set-and-forget, letting the technology perform the heavy lifting. As a result, IT engineers can set their focus on the cutover which is the most important aspect of the migration.