Cybernetics Review

Underwood Memorial Hospital

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Cybernetics is the Best in Backup - our customers back that up.

Underwood-Memorial Hospital is a 305 licensed-bed, acute-care, non-profit hospital serving Gloucester County and parts of Salem and Camden counties in New Jersey. With over 1,700 full and part-time employees, Underwood provides a comprehensive array of diagnostic, therapeutic and rehabilitative services in a community hospital setting. Jason works in the information systems department of the hospital, and according to him, the goal of his department "is to provide our employees and staff with reliable access to information and applications they use on a day-to-day basis."

Meeting this goal had become difficult for Jason's department. Every time they ran out of storage space, they would need to build a new server with more direct attached storage, and that became very cumbersome in the 24/7, around the clock pace of the health care industry where non-stop functionality is absolutely critical. Jason added that, "The limitation we had before was storage capacity. We could only go so big and stay within a server's reliability and redundancy. If that server blew up, then the data pretty much went with it. With the Cybernetics SAN, you can obviously launch more capacity, but by utilizing two of them, we were able to actually spread them physically to separate areas within our campus, and so if there was ever a disaster or anything like that in one area, we still have a perfect copy of the data that's on it, in another physical area."

Even though the Underwood-Memorial Hospital had been using Cybernetics backup solutions for years, when it came time to look for storage solutions, they took a look at the offerings of several other manufacturers. According to Jason, "what they were trying to sell us was way off the chart from what we wanted to try to do, and the pricing was astronomical comparatively". That is when they realized that the Cybernetics storage solution would not only meet their needs, but save them money too.

The Cybernetics entry-level SAN is a disk-based storage appliance that virtualizes RAID disk storage. Using the iSCSI protocol over gigabit Ethernet links, the SAN solution presents virtual disk drives as simple drive letters to host systems. The host enjoys complete disk storage functionality. Configurable access and control security are included and are fully functional with standard networking hardware.

Underwood Memorial Hospital is currently using the Cybernetics units to provide an archival and storage system for their Cardiac Catheterization lab. Of the 3.2 TB of raw space, they allotted 1.5 terabytes for storing the images and allocated the remainder for storage and archive for critical systems. Jason is excited about the fact that they are saving four or five thousand dollars every time they don't have to build another server to add network storage space. They are ready to add two new units to provide a repository for the "My Documents" folders of all the users on the network. Cybernetics' SAN solution is flexible, affordable and so dependable that Jason has time to sit at his desk and drink a cup of coffee.

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