DobiMigrate Provides Fast, Accurate Migration for Leading Healthcare System

The Customer

The featured customer is a leading not-for-profit healthcare system in the Tampa Bay and Central Florida regions that connects individuals and families to a wide range of services at 13 hospitals and hundreds of other locations, including 13 imaging centers. Inpatient and outpatient services include acute care, primary care, imaging, laboratory, behavioral health, home care, and wellness. Over the past 15 years, the customer has become a leading, high-quality healthcare provider, and they have utilized leading technology in every aspect of their business.

The Challenge

Storage platform migrations in the healthcare industry have historically been painful, and the Information Technology team at the healthcare system was finding itself victim to an urgent, long, and tedious migration. The customer needed to migrate the data of several critical applications, including Siemens EDM, Philips Xcelera, and Philips Witt, from a Dell EMC Centera that was quickly nearing capacity to another storage platform. The maintenance on this Centera was also reaching the end of its life, so the team was faced with a very important business decision on how to move forward with this project. The team ultimately wanted to move these applications from the nearing-capacity Centera to a Dell EMC Isilon. This new storage platform would provide the flexibility that they needed for these applications and anticipated business expansion.

The healthcare system’s IT team typically used generic, industry-standard tools for its migrations, and the team estimated that this project had the potential to take from 12 months to 18 months to complete the migration themselves.

The Solution

The customer turned to its trusted technology partner Dell EMC to provide a solution that would accurately and rapidly migrate all of the data from the Centera to a new Isilon. Dell EMC enlisted the assistance and powerful functionality of DobiMigrate to assess, migrate, and validate and delete the data.

After the software was deployed, DobiMigrate enabled the team to easily:

1. Assess – The customer was able to do a complete assessment on the Centera. DobiMigrate gave the team their first snapshot in to exactly what and how much was stored on the Centera. These powerful reporting insights armed the team with the information that they needed to determine what applications and how much data needed to be migrated to the new, more flexible Isilon platform.
2. Migrate – The IT team analyzed the top-down reporting from the assessment phase and determined that they needed to migrate 57 TB of data of several applications from the Centera to an Isilon.
3. Validate and delete – After all of the data from the applications, primarily from the Philips EDM application, was migrated from the source platform to the target Isilon environment, the team utilized DobiMigrate to delete data from the source platform.

Metrics for Success

It was very important to the customer that the migration from the Centera to the new Isilon be completed quickly. The 57 TB migration using DobiMigrate was 10 times faster than the customer’s IT team originally projected using standard tools. The Siemens EDM application – which occupied about 50% of the space on the Centera – took less than one month to migrate to the new platform. In addition to this migration being extremely fast, it was also completely accurate and there was no disruption to business operations.

Dell EMC, Centera, and Isilon are registered trademarks of Dell Technologies Inc.; Siemens and Philips are registered trademarks of Siemens AG, and Koninklijke Philips N.V., respectively.