Ken Westerback

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  www.snwonline.com/storage_knowledge_center/ibm_02-28-05 - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 2/28/2005    Last Visited: 3/7/2007  

  Ken Westerback, IT architect at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, says he likes the idea of fewer management points but does not care whether virtualization is on his BladeCenter or on an appliance in front of all his storage.
  
  "As far as a single point of management for servers and storage, we're not doing it," he says.However, "I certainly believe the fewer management points, the better," he says.
  
  St. Michael's uses IBM's SVC product to pool storage capacity from two IBM midrange FAStT arrays and a high-end Enterprise Storage Server.Westerback also purchased three IBM BladeCenter products over the past 18 months and is looking to add a second BladeCenter rack.

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  CIO - IBM, Sun look to simplify IT infrastructure - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 2/21/2005    Last Visited: 2/21/2005  

  Ken Westerback, information technology architect at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, said he likes the idea of fewer management points but does not care whether virtualization is on his BladeCenter or on an appliance in front of all his storage.
  
  "As far as a single point of management for servers and storage, we're not doing it," he said.However, "I certainly believe the fewer management points, the better."
  
  St. Michael's uses IBM's SVC product to pool storage capacity from two IBM midrange FAStT arrays and a high-end Enterprise Storage Server.Westerback also purchased three IBM BladeCenter products over the past 18 months and is looking to add a second BladeCenter rack.

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  IBM Beefs Up Its ILM Offerings - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 10/15/2008    Last Visited: 2/22/2005  

  "Virtualization will enable us to move into the ILM world much more smoothly," said IBM SVC user Ken Westerback, an IT administrator for Toronto-based St. Michael's Hospital.

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  IBM Servers, Storage Win over St. Michael's May 13,... - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 5/13/2004    Last Visited: 5/31/2004  

  St. Michael's is a teaching hospital that provides medical services to the inner city of Toronto with about 5,000 staff members and 600 physicians, said Ken Westerback, technology architect for St. Michael's.The hospital's management wanted to move away from a fragmented department-based IT infrastructure to a more centralized approach that could provide real-time patient information to doctors and other health care providers, he said.
  
  After spending much of the initial phase of the project working on renovating portions of the hospital to accept new telecommunications gear and modern server equipment, St. Michael's did not have much time to select a vendor for its server and storage purchases.The decision came down to IBM and Hewlett-Packard Co., and the hospital chose IBM after giving that company a slight edge in storage products and local services, Westerback said.He shared his experiences with reporters and analysts Wednesday at a storage briefing at IBM's office in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
  
  IBM's storage services team has probably been the most helpful of the various partners Westerback has worked with during the implementation of his new network, he said.
  
  Westerback set up two data centers with IBM's Enterprise Storage Servers (ESS) and FastT900 storage products.The goal was to create two mirrored storage facilities that could provide physicians with easy access to critical patient data.
  
  The main data center holds an ESS product along with a FastT900 server that stores 12 to 18 months of image data, Westerback said.The other FastT900 is located in a separate data center as a disaster recovery unit, and hosts a mirror of the main data center.
  
  IBM's SAN (storage area network) Volume Controller software allowed St. Michael's to purchase the less-expensive FastT900 server to mirror the ESS data center, Westerback said.SAN Volume Controller allows IT managers to move data around a SAN from device to device without having to assign a dedicated piece of storage for a particular application.
  
  St. Michael's also has to ensure it has adequate storage capacity to comply with patient record legislation from the Canadian government as well as legislation under consideration by the province of Ontario regarding patient record storage, similar to the requirements placed on U.S. health-care providers under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA.
  
  For now, Westerback thinks the hospital has enough storage to maintain secure patient records in line with the legislative requirements.Storage management and performance management software tools are the next pieces of the puzzle for the hospital's IT infrastructure, he said.

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  IBM offers low cost disk, tamper-proof tape - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 10/8/2003    Last Visited: 5/13/2004  

  Ken Westerback, technology architect at St Michael's Hospital, has a different view."We have groups within the hospital that have different abilities to pay for storage; Our research group uses lots of storage, but they don't need high availability -- the FAStT100 would be good for them," he said.

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  IBM, HP Stretch Storage Limits - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 5/19/2004    Last Visited: 5/19/2004  

  "It turned out a lot of our applications had specific needs," said Ken Westerback, a technology architect for St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto.

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  IT Business - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 12/30/2005    Last Visited: 12/30/2005  

  Ken Westerback, information technology architect at St. Michael,s Hospital in Toronto, said in the health-care industry, institutions are restricted to the operating systems application vendors develop their software on.Applications like PACS, for example, still run on Windows and there are very few, if any, versions developed for the Linux platform yet.
  
  ,We have a wide mix, but most of our choice is driven by the application at this time,, said Westerback.
  
  Westerback added St. Mike,s is increasingly relying on open source apps for Web services at the front end and databases at the back end.
  
  ,Those are the two areas that are established, if not dominant, open source projects that one can deploy and rely on more so than commercial applications that are available,, he said.
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  Westerback, however, said there are many avenues for support beyond a vendor or distributor.
  
  ,You may not have a direct and unique relationship with some of those directly responsible for that software,, said Westerback, adding that St. Mike,s, a large Novell user, has a support contract with the Waltham, Mass.-based firm. ,On the other hand, the strength of the open source market is that you have choices.

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  Server Pipeline | Trends | Storage: New Tools, More... - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 7/12/2004    Last Visited: 7/16/2004  

  In the past, "an operator typically took a full day to find the right tape, read the right data off the tape, and copy it to the right place, so we gave users a window of 48 hours," IT architect Ken Westerback says."Now it's a matter of minutes."
  
  Westerback is eyeing a combination of SAN-management products from IBM's Tivoli unit.In about a year, he wants data backup to move across the SAN instead of the company's LAN."We could free up the network and improve the security because the SAN is less likely to be snooped," he says.

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  Storage Pipeline | Embracing Storage - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 11/15/2004    Last Visited: 11/25/2004  

  Storage needs to get cheaper, says Ken Westerback of St. Michael's Hospital.Storage needs to get cheaper, says Ken Westerback of St. Michael's Hospital.
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  Ken Westerback, an IT architect at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, is looking for help from IBM to deal with rapid growth of raw capacity, thanks to digital-imaging systems and X-rays.The hospital needs tiered storage to deal with some 20 terabytes a year in new imaging data, while the number of users on E-mail mushrooms from 2,000 to 5,000."We need to incrementally add physical storage, and it should be far cheaper over time--easily 50% to 70% less" than today's prices, he says.
  
  He's considering IBM's Total Storage Manager, with automated provisioning and storage-resource management, so he doesn't have to purchase what he calls "worst case" volumes of capacity."We'll try to buy into low-cost serial ATA drives next year," he says.One big motivation for rethinking the company's storage strategy: An IT effort called Project Gemini that aims to eliminate notes on charts and increase doctors' ability to work online, to order drugs and tests, and do other administrative tasks.To increase digitization, St. Michael's is considering buying PDAs for doctors or Tablet PCs to put on patients' bedsides."Whatever option we choose next year, it means a lot more data online for access," Westerback says.

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  The Road To ILM - Computer Business Review - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 1/6/2004    Last Visited: 7/16/2004  

  The 600-bed hospital's IT architect Ken Westerback says that although tiers of lower-cost ATA disks are on the books, ILM is not.
  
  "We're planning to use lower cost storage, because we have a lot of different classifications of data.We don't anticipate having to move data around - we'll classify it and allocate it to the right storage," says Westerback.If there is a change of classification, the hospital will simply move data from one tier to another, using IBM's SAN Volume Controller virtualisation system.
  
  "If we decide that we want to move some particular research data that needs to be stored on a high-availability system, we can move it using SVC, from say a FastT [midrange] array to an ESS [high-end] array - without needing any ILM software," says Westerback.
  
  Part of the reason why Westerback does not think the hospital needs any ILM software is because it currently enjoys a great deal of spare storage capacity.

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