Poor I/O Performance Could Degrade Healthcare Big Data Analytics

January 30, 2019 - Poor input-output (I/O) performance could have a negative effect on healthcare big data analytics, warned Condusiv Technologies CEO James D’Arezzo.

SQL databases in particular are a factor in poor I/O performance. SQL databases generate the most storage I/O traffic.  

Nearly one-third of the IT pros responsible for I/O performance said that they are currently experiencing complaints due to sluggish applications running on SQL, according to Condusiv’s 2019 I/O Performance Survey, which polled 906 IT professionals.

“I/O performance in SQL is a problem for CIOs and IT heads across the entire economy,” said D'Arezzo.

Half of the IT pros responsible for I/O performance said they currently have applications that are tough to support from a systems performance standpoint. These applications include electronic health records (EHRs).

Three-fourths of respondents said they are investing in hardware to provide additional capacity and improve I/O performance. They have purchased new servers with more cores, new all-flash arrays, new hybrid arrays, server-side SSDs, but they are still having problems. In fact, one-third have performance issues that are preventing them from scaling up their virtualized infrastructures.

However, more than half of respondents said they were not aware that Windows write inefficiencies generate increasingly smaller writes and reads that dampen I/O performance. This is a software issue that cannot be solved by the addition of new hardware, observed D’Arezzo.

Healthcare big data analytics is becoming an important tool for healthcare organizations. In fact, P&S Market Research forecasts the healthcare big data analytics market to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22 percent, reaching a market value of $22.7 billion by 2023.

Market growth is being fueled by an increase in financial analytics use in healthcare, a surge in demand for analysis of structured and unstructured health data, decreasing costs and availability of big data software and services, and increased adoption of new technologies for data analytics in healthcare business transformations.

The use of personalized healthcare systems and demand for high quality healthcare services is also driving healthcare big data analytics market growth.

The volume of healthcare data will explode in the next few years, leaving organizations struggling to identify and use the most relevant data. This will require more computing power, hardware, network capacity, and devices, along with maintenance of cloud infrastructure, servers, desktops, laptops, and storage and network devices.

Frost & Sullivan projects that by end of 2019 half of all healthcare organizations will have resources dedicated to accessing, sharing, and analyzing real-world data and that the healthcare big data analytics market will top $68 billion by 2020.

In a recent survey by Damo Consulting, healthcare executives identified big data analytics as one of their IT spending priorities.

The survey found that healthcare IT budgets are expected to increase by 20 percent, with healthcare executives more positive about growth in IT spending than vendors.

Close to 80 percent of healthcare executive said that there will be significant growth in healthcare IT spending in 2019, while only 60 percent of vendors expect significant growth in healthcare IT spending this year.

Three-quarters of healthcare executives said that the rapid change in the healthcare IT landscape makes buying/technology spending decisions harder, while 80 percent of vendors had that view.

Around half of healthcare executives see a lack of maturity in technology solution choices for digital initiatives, and 42 percent said they lack internal capabilities to manage digital initiatives.

“Digital and AI are emerging as critical areas for technology spend among healthcare enterprises in 2019. However, healthcare executives are realistic around their technology needs vs. their need to improve care delivery. They find the currently available digital health solutions in the market are not very mature,” said Damo Consulting CEO Paddy Padmanabhan. “However, they are also more upbeat about the overall IT spend growth than their technology vendors.”