How does a "Storage Network" apply to EMR?

How much should we know about Storage Networks? Can someone explain this concept in EMR terms?

Why do they call it a "Storage Network" instead of just "storage"?

Although I am a nerd--meaning that I love computers--I am not yet a geek--meaning that I understand networks--but I'm working on it.  

Help us out, technical people. Storage Networks are important because.............

 

I'll give this a whirl.

I think when you say Storage Network you are referring to Storage Area Networks or often called SANs.  Really a SAN is basically a bunch of disks that can be connected to a bunch of different servers over fiber optics.  You can see more formal definitions at the Wikipedia and Webopedia.


My personal experience with a SAN is that they are fantastic, but they are quite complex to work with.  They are getting cheaper and easier to manage(evidenced by a nice SAN product from Apple), but it still takes some work to get it working.

To me the real advantage of a SAN is that it allows you to do clustering.  It separates your data from your server making the 2 independent of each other.  This makes managing servers very nice(pull out a server and update it with no down time) and backups of the data(you can backup your data to disk and then from disk to tape).

So, why would an EMR want to use a SAN?  Quite frankly most won't want to right now.  Purchasing a server with a bunch of hard drives is good enough for most small doctors offices.  It could be very beneficial for very large offices that need to maintain 24 x 7 uptime and/or store a whole lot of data.  A server these days can only reach about 1.8 Terabytes of data(6 300 gig hard drives).  SANS can easily hit 7 Terabytes of data(and plenty more if you have the $$).

Sure, you can hook up a nice scsi shelf to increase the number of drives on a server, but then you get much slower response reading the drive through the scsi connection.  Often they use the term "High Availability" when they talk about the speed with which you can access data on a SAN.  Besides storage space the speed with which you can access a large amount of data is what sets SANs apart from just a bunch of drives.

There are some other real nice features with SANS, but these are the main ones in my mind.  As they get cheaper and EMR's databases get bigger I see them becoming a larger part of an EMR system.  Until then, no need to worry.


As far as "Why do they call it a "Storage Network" instead of just "storage"?"

I think the terminology "network" is applied because you are connected to the SAN(or storage) using fiber optics and you go through a fiber switch to enable fast access to the drives.

John,

Excellent! Just what I was looking for! You have become a steady resource for high-tech knowledge, and you are able to explain it in a way that low-tech people can understand. Good work, Techguy!