“Northern Storage Suite regulates 25,000 of our users on a daily basis.” - Manager of Network Servers and Desktop Design, UPMC Health Systems

What’s to be done when an enterprise network suffers from seemingly irreversible data congestion?

With more than 25,000 employees, UPMC Health System is the largest not-for-profit
integrated health care system in the United States. UPMC is affiliated with the University of
Pittsburgh Schools of Health Sciences and is the leading integrated health care system in
western Pennsylvania, offering a variety of health related services and products.

An organization that grows as fast as UPMC requires a responsive, resourceful IT staff
particularly if it’s required to maintain peak network performance on a tight budget. Karen
Malik, Manager of Network Servers and Desktop Design at UPMC Health Systems oversees
a staff that installs and maintains Windows servers in an expanding 325+ server environment.
She also manages a staff of developers that sets up the desktop standards and creates and
deploys standard desktop OS and software packages.

With a workforce of 25,000 employees, the network’s storage capacity, about 1.8 terabytes
of user data, was constantly in jeopardy of being overtaken by personal data. While
purchasing disk space is perceived to be cheap, this fails to account for the additional
management required to perform routine backups and restores, to ongoing monitoring and
maintenance --all of which places burdens on the IT organization, and represents significant
added costs.

According to Karen, “Some users will take up infinite disk space causing a challenge in
keeping disk space available for our large number of users. Before implementing Northern
Storage Suite we had no charge-back method, so ISD was financially supporting all server
hardware and we simply couldn’t afford not to control the disk usage”.

After reading a review in an online newsletter, Karen downloaded and installed Northern
Storage Suite. Since then, UPMC purchased 12 licenses, providing the IT organization with a
seamless, transparent means of managing their storage resources.

Northern Storage Suite is an enterprise SRM solution offering an array of "zero administration,
hassle-free features," encompassing disk quotas, a user-oriented storage portal promoting
self-management, features focused on automation of fundamental SRM tasks, the means of
alleviating the burden of storage costs via a system of chargeback and, of course,
transparency of storage usage through comprehensive reporting.

By placing quotas on the users and common storage areas, UPMC was able to manage their
data without the purchase of additional hardware. Coupled with a policy employing Northern
Storage Suite’s ability to inform and involve end-users in the process of storage management;
UPMC has achieved significant savings in terms of user time and administrative overhead.

Of course, the pressures to reduce TCO in such an environment require that UPMC work
with a dependable software and a dependable software supplier; “Northern Storage Suite
runs smoothly and quickly. Northern’s support has been great, responsive, patient and
helpful.” Malik expounds, “Northern Storage Suite has made UPMC more productive, which
is, finally, what it's all about."