2022-23 DCIG TOP 5 Storage for Healthcare Solutions Report Now Available

• Healthcare, Storage Systems, Top 5

DCIG is pleased to announce the immediate availability of the 2022-23 DCIG TOP 5 Storage for Healthcare Solutions report. DCIG evaluated sixteen providers offering healthcare storage solutions across six different categories.  This report provides guidance on the TOP 5 vendors providing storage solutions organizations should consider for the unique storage solutions healthcare organizations require. 

DCIG’s TOP 5 reports help IT decision makers:

• Save time discovering, researching, and analyzing products for consideration.
• Understand essential factors organizations should consider for selecting a provider.
• Identify differentiators between top providers that may be important to their business.

Healthcare Data Storage is Challenging

Healthcare IT must tackle significantly more challeng­ing data handling requirements than most enterprises. In this environment, data storage is perhaps the most difficult architectural component to structure and operate both effectively for the mission and correctly for security. Not only are ultra-high availability, remote collaboration and fast data access critical to treating patients and achieving good patient outcomes, but also data protection needs to be paramount. And both compliance and data privacy regulations ensure that healthcare IT has a lot of demanding work cut out for them in managing data access, integrity/retention and disaster recovery.

Because of these challenges, healthcare is lagging behind many industries in IT modernization efforts. But there is incredible opportunity. Many healthcare organizations have now adopted key transforma­tion initiatives to provide connected/remote care, conduct clinical and population health analysis, coordinate patent care across locations, improve patient engagement and foster more personalized/ precision medicine.

Specific healthcare workloads requiring aligned modern data storage can include PACs/VNA (medi­cal imaging and image archives), telemedicine/tele­health distance sharing and collaboration (VDI etc.), EMR/EHR (patient records) and big data powered research analytics. These applications require local performant access to large media files (both images and video streams), secure sharing and collabora­tion across distances, and large on-line archives.

Large image data needs to be available on-demand, the image application needs fast streaming quality access, and online sharing needs to be supported and secured—all can be challenges for healthcare IT stuck with weak data storage solutions. Patient health records may be hard to access even internally (much less transferred to the point of patient care) due to overburdened or legacy storage systems that are still in use because of the fear of failing to meet legal compliance or security concerns (i.e. protecting data in a cloud or cloud-like distributed system).

Benefits of an Effective Storage for Healthcare Solution

The modern storage solutions evaluated in this report all have features that address IT moderniza­tion challenges and concerns. From a healthcare business perspective, they support and enable many of the desired healthcare IT initiatives mentioned above. For example, these storage solutions can be used to modernize and consolidate unstructured file data storage that is often found locked inside aging NAS arrays local to each hospital data center. By aggregating local data into a global, distributed “file system”, data management policies can be applied immediately and universally while ensuring wide secure access for collaboration and sharing. Many of the solutions address performance with “edge” devices that can provide flash-speed streaming media access to local applications.

“It’s hard to imagine truly proving compliance and really protecting critical data without the support of a modern healthcare storage solution.”  

– Mike Matchett, DCIG Consulting Analyst

Distinguishing Features of Storage for Healthcare Solutions

In addition to the broad feature sets mentioned above, all of the storage solutions evaluated in this report have a few things in common that distin- guish them for the Healthcare use case from the wider market of IT data storage solutions:

• Scalable capacity. They scale capacity (to many PB) cost-effectively, enabling global NAS consolidation and the creation of a single file system architecture.
• Performance at scale. They have the ability to deliver low latency and high throughput streams to support the most demanding data- intensive applications even as they scale.
• Interoperability and access. They provide multiprotocol support and a wide range of connectivity to meet a variety of workload requirements while delivering IO to a large set of simultaneous, distributed users.
• Architectural flexibility. They generally can adopt or include a vari- ety of underlying storage media, storage server node types and cloud extensions as storage tiering needs grow and expand with a proven track record of refresh and updating to new technologies.
• Enterprise management. They offer solid, mature management approaches and policy-based management for data protection, security, replication/synchronization, access and audit, monitoring and lifecycle data governance.

Storage for Healthcare Solutions

In preparing this report DCIG evaluated sixteen vendors that offer storage for healthcare solutions. The general categories under which DCIG evaluated solution features included:

• Deployment capabilities
• Data Protection
• Product and Performance Management
• Documentation
• Technical Support
• Licensing and Pricing

Based on these criteria, DCIG awarded the following Storage for Healthcare vendors a TOP 5 ranking (in alphabetical order):

• Dell PowerScale
• IBM Spectrum Scale
• Nasuni
• Pavilion HyperParallel Data Platform
• Quantum StorNext

Report Availability

The DCIG TOP 5 Report is available for download at the links below. The full report contains additional details such as:

• A listing of all sixteen vendors evaluated
• An overview of the benefits of an effective Storage for Healthcare solution
• Features shared by all TOP 5 vendors
• A deeper explanation of the key similarities and differences between the TOP 5 solutions
• A profile of each solution that highlights the key features that earned each solution a spot among DCIG TOP 5 solutions

The following solution provider has licensed the right to distribute this report. Individuals may access DCIG research at no cost by following the link below.

Nasuni: Download the full 2022-23 DCIG TOP 5 Storage for Healthcare Solutions report (with registration)

CONFIDENTIALITY AND COPYRIGHT

Other than excerpts from this report published in this announcement, the contents of the 2022-23 DCIG TOP 5 Storage for Healthcare Solutions report are copyrighted and may not be republished without permission. Individuals may access the full report at no cost by following one of the above links.

DCIG will release more TOP 5 reports in the weeks, months, and years to come. Please sign up for the weekly DCIG Newsletter to receive notice of their availability.