- What the Growth of Data Virtualization Means for Healthcare
“By continuing to expand the scope of our application coverage, we are able to bring our unique value proposition to more customer use cases. Catalogic's copy automation software enables user self-service to deliver real-world efficiencies for a variety of use cases: analytics intelligence, software development, or anything that relies on near real-time data access."
Catalogic ECX is an in-place software-defined copy data management solution (CDM) that manages the snapshot, replication, and cloning technologies of a customer’s existing storage and virtual infrastructure environment. The in-place nature of the tool does not require the customer to purchase or manage additional infrastructure technology to implement it.
Catalogic ECX provides a single tool set across heterogeneous vendor storage arrays enabling organizations to leverage storage snapshots for application-aware data protection and recovery. It also integrates copy delivery with DevOps tools and workflows and automates disaster recovery with non-disruptive DR testing.
ECX does not copy data onto a third-party device running separate hardware and proprietary file systems. For healthcare organizations, this is especially significant because development projects are being done on the storage that will be used when the applications are moved into production. The less applications and files are being moved around, the less chance there is that PHI will be compromised.
"Catalogic's in-place approach makes a great deal of sense for software development environments," Wikibon CTO and Co-founder David Floyer said in a statement. "By automating, tracking and auditing copy delivery and access, every member of the development team has faster access to the most recent versions of data. By automating the workflows and eliminating security and compliance problems, experience has shown that programmer output can be improved by 2x or greater, reducing cost and improving time to value for development."
Lumenate SVP of Transformative Advisory Services and Healthcare Jamie Shepard said that Catalogic ECX changed the organization’s view of health IT infrastructure from data center outward to end user inward. Lumenate can now address the end users and application owners including EHRs.
Virtual data centers or software-defined data centers (SDDC) are an evolving technology that virtualizes components of an organization’s data architecture, saving on cost and space. SDDC uses abstraction to bring different components of infrastructure architecture together, usually managed through an application programming interface (API).
APIs abstract the layers of virtual technology within the data center, only displaying functions critical to the developer making the SDDC easier to manage.
A Research and Markets report published late last year predicted the global SDDC market to reach a total market size of $81.381 billion by the end of 2021 due to the increased use of internet networking heightening the demand for storage space, computing power, and complex networking.
Other virtualized technology, such as software-defined networking (SDN) and software-defined storage (SDS), are also becoming more popular in the healthcare sector. The growth of virtualized infrastructure is attributed to the dynamic provisioning of networking resources and their reduced operational costs.
As healthcare organizations adopt more advanced infrastructure technology, they seek storage and data center technology that will abstract and automate resources to bridge pieces of the infrastructure architecture.