NYC Hospitals Consolidate Disparate Data Centers

HCI: How do you balance user preferences with the cost of storage?

Robles: It’s a huge challenge just talking about storage first. Storage is growing at an exponential rate. Plus some other events in the industry, e-Discovery and other legal and investigative reasons, there’s an enormous amount of data we have to retain for an indefinite period of time. The use of video is consuming a lot of storage.

One of the things we’re looking at is we have a record retention and disposition workgroup looking at all the legal, state, city, and storage requirements we have. They try to revise our retention policies because we do need to have a more efficient way of disposing of information to actually contain the rate of growth of information, and still meet all the operational and regulatory requirements we have. The workgroup consists of legal, compliance, medical records, health information management, and IT operational leadership, as well as engaging state representatives.

HCI: How did HHC fund this project?

Robles: Most of the funding, about 85 percent, was through capital funds, since there was construction component. And the remaining 15 percent was operating dollars. The total was $67 million. We had to build out 4,000 new square feet adjacent to the existing data center at the Bronx Jacobi Medical Center location. So what we did was build out our back-up data center first, and once we had it to relocate our equipment, we just ran production out of our back-up center. We shut down our primary equipment and moved it into the new space, while we renovated the remaining 2,600 square feet. We’ve completed all that.

HCI: What were the cost savings realized from the consolidation?

Robles: First of all we have picked up about 13,000 square feet we can reprogram. We had projected with our current inventory of servers hosting applications throughout the corporation to spend $116 million by 2015. We’ve reduced that projected spend down to $42 million just on the hardware. In the last 10 months, we’ve already realized $7.9 million in savings from equipment we didn’t have to buy.

We saw environmental savings in power and air conditioning. We’ve also been able to reassign staff, as we were spending a few million dollars a year on consulting services because we didn’t have enough staff.

We decided after analysis that it also made sense to consolidate our help desk operations, which were dispersed in more than 11 locations. We decided to create a Tier 1 enterprise service desk, which is a consolidation of the help desk functions for support into one location, and we expanded our services to a 24/7 single point of contact for IT services. We still have three more sites to complete the consolidation in Q1 or Q2 2011. Afterwards, we’re projecting 35,000 calls per month for service requests. We’re going to annually save about $15 to $20 million, compared to what we would have spent if we still had disparate data centers.