Profiles in Success: Weill Cornell Medical College
New York, NY — The 20 academic departments within Weill Cornell Medical College focus on the delivery of clinical medicine, patient care, and the study, treatment, and prevention of human diseases. In all, Weill’s Information Technology Services (ITS) department supports 15,000 active computer users — including research scientists and medical students — and maintains and preserves some 36 terabytes of user storage. With such an enormous need to manage mission-critical data, Weill Cornell couldn’t take a chance on system downtime. That’s why the IT team included a storage solution based on Xsan, Xserve servers, and Xserve RAID.
Xsan is probably one of the lowest-maintenance services I’ve ever used.
— Dan Dickinson,
Technologies Manager,
Weill Cornell Medical College
Like other similar institutions, Weill Cornell Medical College is home to instructors, researchers, and providers of patient care. All three generate extremely large amounts of data on a daily basis. For example, lectures from the medical college are captured and archived, while electronic medical records — which can include x-rays, comprehensive documentation, and other content — are created for each patient served in the medical center. Add in the administrative systems required to support the college, and Weill Cornell has a significant data storage challenge. Additionally, doctors, researchers, faculty, and administrators need reliable 24-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week access to their data.
Multiple Features Prompt
Apple Purchase
In 2003, Weill Cornell deployed its first Xserve RAID storage system. Though the college houses its data on a variety of computing and storage platforms, Assistant Director for Advanced Technology Integration John Ruffing says the Apple solution was attractive for several reasons. “There was no one else who could bring together the combination of features we needed,” Ruffing notes. “First, Apple was a vendor we could trust. Next, Apple offered an easy-to-use solution, it was one that could be incrementally deployed, and it was reliable. Lastly, it was truly cross-platform. As we went forward, their solution has continued to retain those characteristics.”
Weill Cornell’s Collaborative Technologies Manager Dan Dickinson says there were still more aspects of the Apple solution that led to its purchase. “We were really pushing for redundancy and reliability,” he explains. “When you’re direct-attached to one server and that server goes down, you’re out of luck. By offering our services on Xsan, we’d have failover capability for our home directories, video storage, and streaming. It was great to have this very robust, easily grown resource from Apple.”
Objectives
- Provide backup of academic, research, patient, and administrative data
- Ensure reliability of storage systems
- Support data created with disparate platforms and applications
Solutions
- 25 Xserve servers
- 17 Xserve RAID
- Xsan
- Apple Remote Desktop
- Mac OS X with Workgroup Manager, NetBoot, Open Directory
- Tivoli Storage Manager*, AIX, Sun Solaris, Windows 2003 servers
Results
- IT department reports Apple storage has enterprise-class reliability
- College is enjoying low cost-per-gigabyte for storage
- Xsan’s ease of use enabled system deployment in one hour
- Xserve RAID connects seamlessly to multiple operating systems
*The mention of third-party products is for informational purposes only and represents neither an endorsement nor a recommendation.
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