05/26/05 -
Caregroup adopts Onaro SANscreen
Healthcare Industry Prescribes Onaro for SAN Change Management
Caregroup, Priority Health and Others Adopt Onaro SANscreen to Ensure Compliance, Manage Storage Network Growth & Complexity and Ensure Availability of Critical Data
BOSTON, Mass. – May 26, 2005 – Storage Decisions 2005, CHICAGO and BOSTON, May 26 /PRNewswire/ -- Onaro, Inc., the pioneer of change management software for storage networks, today announced that it has experienced tremendous momentum in the healthcare industry, with a growing number of healthcare customers adopting its award- winning SANscreen® Predictive Change Management software.
Plagued by increased volumes of mission critical business, patient and clinical information, and the combination of new and ongoing government regulations, healthcare organizations are seeking methods to optimize their SAN environments and adopt new ways of maximizing IT resources. Through the use of SANscreen, Aetna, CareGroup Health Systems and Priority Health, among others, have increased storage network availability and cost savings while eliminating risks of downtime associated with SAN changes.
They also use SANscreen to capture a complete, detailed history of each and every change event -- necessary not only for root-cause analysis if problems occur, but also to support internal auditing and ongoing regulatory compliance, including HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley.
According to Enterprise Strategy Group Founder and Senior Analyst, Steve Duplessie, "Application outages and data loss can be catastrophic events when medical staff cannot access critical information to diagnose patients and prescribe treatment -- something I know first hand. Onaro's SANscreen can help eliminate an inordinate amount of downtime, which can directly lead to saving lives."
Priority Health, a health plan serving nearly 450,000 Michigan residents, uses SANscreen to manage changes in a SAN environment growing in size and complexity (doubling in size every two years). Before SANscreen, storage managers wrestled with cumbersome and functionally limited spreadsheets to document and track day-to-day changes as well as major projects. Multiple spreadsheets used to support these processes contained inconsistencies in resource allocations and had to be reconciled once every month. "We had very limited visibility and understanding of all the configurations in our end-to- end network, no way to validate that changes were being made correctly, and no way to ensure that changes were not adversely impacting SAN operations," explained Aaron Nienhuis, manager of IT Infrastructure for Priority Health.
"Through improved efficiency and the adoption of a 'predictive change management' methodology, we're able to confidently manage more SAN changes in an increasingly complex environment without additional resources and continuously validate our end-to-end SAN against business rules and best practices," Nienhuis noted. "This visibility into the network has enabled our team to shorten the time it takes to perform SAN planning and validation by more than 50 percent."
Similarly, over the last six years, CareGroup Healthcare System's SAN requirements have grown by nearly 2,500 percent, with increases of up to 200 percent during certain years due to the introduction of new applications and the adoption of an information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy. With more than 13,000 employees, 2,000 medical professionals and an IT staff of more than 200, CareGroup offers a broad spectrum of health services to residents of Eastern Massachusetts in a variety of settings. Using SANscreen, CareGroup's storage engineers have created a sequence of steps they take in order to implement a specific change and then simulate those steps to predict the impact on the SAN. This enables SANscreen to automate, control and accelerate CareGroup's entire SAN change management process, instead of using error-prone manual processes.
"From the host level to the disk level and everything in between, including network backup and software-related issues, our SAN presents a major management challenge," said Michael Passe, senior storage architect for CareGroup. "It was very important to get a handle on our storage environment early, before it got too complex. We can now visualize, verify and simulate planned changes -- understanding their impact across our entire SAN."
Healthcare customers nationwide have been pleased to find that SANscreen can be installed, functional and producing value in their production environments within one day. "Right away, we were able to detect allocated LUNs that were not reflected in our spreadsheets and expose zoning and LUN masking to decommissioned hosts,"Nienhuis added.
SANscreen also improves the lives of storage managers and administrators, making SAN change management a reliable process that spares them and others from long nights and weekends troubleshooting SAN problems. "SANscreen is a one-stop 'health check' when troubleshooting and conducting post SAN change validation and has led to many more good nights' sleep for members of our storage team. It took less than 24-hours to fully deploy the product due to its non-invasive, agent-less architecture, and CareGroup received a return on investment (ROI) in the first month of use," Passe concluded.
About Onaro, Inc.
Onaro is the pioneer in Change Management for SANs, enabling enterprises to quickly and effectively manage changes and growth in complex Storage Area Networks with absolute confidence through SANscreen® Monitoring and Predictive Change Management software. SANscreen is currently deployed at some of the world's largest SANs. Onaro is a privately held company backed by leading investors Newbury Ventures and Cedar Fund. For more information, please visit http://www.onaro.com .
SANscreen is a registered trademark of Onaro, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.
