One critical piece of Kindred's unwieldy storage puzzle is that it needs fast and easy access to backup, archiving and disaster recovery systems. There are legal reasons: For example, Kindred Healthcare often receives subpoenas to provide what Chapman describes generically as "select e-mails from executives who were having conversations about a certain topic during a certain time period.

"All of this is kind of recent, and all this has ratcheted up in the last five years as more [legal and government] attention has come to this industry," he says.

Business continuity figures prominently, too. If a financial or a patient-care system goes down, Kindred has to be able to recover data quickly.

Like many companies, Kindred has relied upon tape backup systems and massive, centralized data libraries for archiving and recovery. Tape, however, has its limits, as storage volume grows. Balaouras writes that enterprises "aren't frustrated with tape" itself, even though it's "slower than disk," and "more prone to errors." The issue, she says, is that companies can't back up so much data during the time they have set aside for that process. Chapman confirms that nightly backups have become nearly impossible. "It takes more time to back up and recover than we have time available in the data center overnight," Chapman says.

Other healthcare CIOs also have concerns regarding tape's limitations. John Halamka, the CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Harvard Medical School, writes on his blog, Life as a Healthcare CIO, that tape backup, which BIDMC has used for decades, "suffers from a variety of problems. Tape backups are time-consuming. Tapes are fragile and require physical security when transported. The time required to retrieve and recover from tape stresses our service availability objectives." Like Chapman, Halamka is deploying VTL technology.

A key benefit of VTL is data "deduplication," an approach that reduces a big portion of redundant data that can hog disk space and provides quicker access to data, as compared to tape. For example, each time a document is backed up, only the changes that a user makes to that document are saved—not the entire document or copies of the document. Chapman is using VTL technology from Sepaton, and Halamka is rolling out similar technology from Data Domain. Halamka is moving even faster than Chapman: Halamka wants to completely eliminate the need for tape in his data center in two years.

Repurposing Storage Dollars

"Doing more with less" has become a familiar refrain for almost every business today, but this is especially true for health care. Respondents to the HIMSS survey said for the eighth year in a row that the most significant barrier to successful implementation of IT was a lack of money.