Review: Dell EMC Data Domain DD6300 Offers Providers Enhanced Data Protection

Data storage in healthcare is critically important — not only are providers required to protect vital records under regulations such as HIPAA, but the information also must be available at a moment’s notice for timely and efficient patient care.

That’s why the Dell EMC Data Domain DD6300 network-attached storage device is such a great choice for healthcare organizations. It provides the ease of use and plug-and-play capability of NAS and arrives built out, configured and ready to go.

Many higher-capacity NAS devices come without drives, just empty bays. Organizations must buy the drives they want to use separately, and then configure the device to work well within their organization.

By contrast, the DD6300 NAS comes with all 12 drive bays filled and configured for use within healthcare.

DOWNLOAD: See how mobile technology takes care to the next level!

Boost Protection for Vital Health Records

Each drive is a quick, 7,200-rpm unit with 4 terabytes of capacity. That provides 48TB of raw storage. However, the drives are preconfigured to RAID 6 to protect the vital health records they will store. Known as double-parity RAID, it breaks up data, sending two strips of information to each disk for every record it stores. That means that in the unlikely event that two of the 12 drives fail at the same time, no records will be lost.

The trade-off for that level of protection is a reduction in overall storage capacity, to 34TB. But it’s a compromise that’s a no-brainer within healthcare. And in the event of a failure, all the drives are hot-swappable. Swapping in a replacement can be done quickly, without any downtime.

While the DD6300’s RAID ­configuration protects records from major hardware failures, the embedded EMC Data Domain OS watches over everything else. It is reliant on sector-by-sector checks, cleaning, defragmentation, verification, checksum testing and snapshots, and is designed to be self-healing, ensuring that there is no data degradation or bit rot, even if a record has not been accessed for many years.

The ability to easily and quickly add self-healing, reliable and redundant storage — without the need for a dedicated storage administrator — makes the Dell EMC Data Domain DD6300 NAS a potent solution for handling the requirements of a variety of provider organizations.

Expand Storage Without Adding New Drives

While it’s not a huge loss, having the 12 included disk drives within the Dell EMC Data Domain DD6300 network-attached storage device configured into a highly redundant RAID 6 configuration reduces the overall storage capacity of the device from 48 terabytes to 34. This is necessary to ensure that no records are ever lost, even in the highly unlikely event that two drives fail simultaneously.

But that’s not the end of the story. The included EMC Data Domain OS, in addition to providing self-healing technologies, also supports native deduplication — a perfect technology for healthcare records.

For deduplication, common items within documents are stored only one time. Thereafter, instead of storing the same thing on another record, a tiny pointer is inserted. Areas like the “name” and “date” fields on forms, or the hospital’s address — any of those common fields that everyone needs to fill out when visiting the doctor — are easily subject to deduplication.

A common field like name might exist on thousands of records. But instead of storing every instance of first name, middle initial and last name, pointers are used. When retrieving a record, the system looks at the pointer for first name and populates that field, because it’s identical to every other instance of the form. The patient’s actual name is stored only once, along with the tiny pointers.

This might save only a few kilobytes per record. But multiplied thousands of times, it adds up — especially in healthcare, where the same forms might be used repeatedly for years. The Data Domain DD6300 NAS includes this technology, and that can make a huge difference in the device’s ultimate storage capacity.

In my tests, the original 34TB of storage ultimately achieved almost 100TB of capacity using deduplication and a stack of generic, identical forms populated with random information. In general, storage companies say deduplication can increase storage capacity somewhere between 10 and 30 times the starting capacity. But in healthcare, because of the similarity of the records, it almost always falls at the higher end of that estimate.

Adding deduplication to complement the device’s easy installation and management is just one more reason why the Data Domain DD6300 NAS is a great choice for healthcare organizations.

Specifications

Storage Capacity: 48TB raw capacity
Drive Bays: 12 (4TB each)
Drive Type: 600MBps, 7,200 rpm
Dimensions: 30.5x19x3.4 inches
Weight: 82 pounds