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Physicians and other clinicians have fast, reliable access to the information and applications they require to deliver outstanding patient care. Business analysts can perform their work faster and run more complex analyses, thanks to better access to greater volumes of data. And IT professionals can focus on high-value priorities without having to allocate key resources to manage complex legacy storage platforms.NAM / United StatesHealthcare INDUSTRY BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION REGION / COUNTRYATLANTIC HEALTH SYSTEM STANDARDIZES ON PURE STORAGE TO DELIVER AWARD-WINNING PATIENT CARE As medical record-keeping is now digital, the keyboard or tablet is as important a piece of equipment in the examining room as a stethoscope or blood-pressure cuff. Keeping those modern tools reliable and instantly available is the job of IT departments. And one of the most forward-looking of those departments is at Atlantic Health System (AHS), a non-profit New Jersey organization with five hospitals, over 1,600 beds and relationships with thousands of practitioners statewide. AHS has award-winning programs in numerous fields, including cancer care, stroke care, cardiology and heart surgery, and workplace environment.“Our goal is to ensure that physicians are confident they will have instant access to the information they need, so they can spend more time in front of patients and not worry about the technology,” observed Pat Zinno, Director of Technology Services and Support for AHS. To that end, he and his colleagues are constantly evaluating the systems that underlie AHS’s IT infrastructure that deliver both patient-facing and business-oriented services.When the decision was made to move to the Epic electronic health record (EHR) system, the team at AHS knew a lot of preparation would be required. And one critical area of preparation was the supporting storage infrastructure.“Epic requires a very high level of storage performance,” noted Meraz Nasir, Manager of Infrastructure Engineering at AHS. “You have to submit performance data to Epic on how your systems are performing, and they have very specific thresholds for measuring performance.”SEEKING A NEW APPROACH TO STORAGE The impending move to Epic “was the right time to rethink our approach to storage,” Zinno said. “We deployed Epic first in out-patient environments, but we knew that within a couple of years we also would have it in in-patient settings. This called for growing the number of end-users from less than 1,000 to around 16,000. We needed storage that could scale up to meet that demand without unnecessary costs, interruptions or management headaches. With a traditional spinning-disk environment, you run into a lot of issues when you add users, and we didn’t want to get into that. So, we thought flash arrays would be a better fit.”After initially evaluating its incumbent storage vendor, AHS found a superior approach: Pure Storage.“Performance was of course an important attribute we required,” Nasir said, “but Pure Storage won us over with several other factors as well — the simplicity of Atlantic Health System has standardized on Pure Storage® solutions for all its mission-critical applications, increasing system responsiveness, cutting the demands on IT staff for storage management, and saving more than $1.3 million over six years.“I’m proud to say we get reports from Epic that show we’ve had 100% availability since the day we installed Pure Storage.”Pat Zinno, Director of Technology Services and SupportPURE STORAGE CASE STUDY | ATLANTIC HEALTH SYSTEM
deployment and management, scalability, flexibility, and the Pure Evergreen™ Storage model. All of those were big factors in our decision.”That decision was not made lightly, however. “It wasn’t easy for some of our team members to be convinced,” Nasir recalled. “And I was skeptical myself at first. So, we started with a proof of concept (POC) trial, and the first thing I wanted to test was the resiliency of the Pure Storage array.”He added, “We wanted to know, can we take out a controller, can we take down the fabric and still have a seamless connection? And what we found was that when we did that, Pure Storage worked even better than all of the other contenders because the integration between Pure and VMware is so superior. The failure of the fabric was flawless, and that was a huge plus for us.”Another contribution to reliability and resiliency, the team found, was the architecture of the Pure Storage array. “One of the major challenges we had was with a non-native dual-pathing solution called PowerPath,” Nasir said. “We always had major challenges with it, including its complexity and a lot of bugs. What Pure did was remove all the components between the server and the storage so that it’s seamless. Pure just works better.”During the POC tests, “everything worked flawlessly, and the performance was always there,” Nasir said. And what was the opinion of a former employee of a large storage vendor now on staff at AHS? “When he came in wearing orange socks, we knew Pure Storage was the choice.” PURE STORAGE QUICKLY BECOMES THE STORAGE STANDARDAHS purchased four FlashArray//M70s to support the Epic environment. And the results have been even better than expected. “I am proud to say that we get reports from Epic that show we’ve had 100% availability since the day we installed Pure Storage,” Zinno said. “They also show that in terms of system throughput, what we achieve between our two data centers is greater than what some customers do on just a single network.”Over a two-year period, Zinno said, AHS grew the number of users on its Citrix XenApp infrastructure running on Pure Storage arrays from less than 1,000 to around 16,000, “and we did that while maintaining performance across the entire platform, so that the user experience stayed consistent the entire time.” Today, that number is close to 20,000, with around 7,000 concurrent users at any one time.The XenApp environment is the primary platform for delivering Epic applications, so better performance in it impacts clinicians throughout AHS, both in its own facilities and at associated sites throughout the region.BLAZING STORAGE PERFORMANCE IMPROVES BUSINESS DECISION-MAKING The impact of Pure Storage on AHS operations was immediately evident. Epic sets a threshold for acceptable storage bandwidth of 1,500Mbs for reads and 300Mbs for writes. In pre-production testing of Pure arrays on a subset of hospital operations, performance results reached 3,000Mbs (reads) and 600Mbs (writes), with latencies also below Epic thresholds (11ms vs. a threshold of 15ms for reads and 3.6ms vs. 5ms for writes). Those performance levels have remained constant even as new users and workloads continue to be added.Another indication of the impact of Pure Storage on AHS comes from Epic’s System Pulse Analytics reporting service, which takes data from AHS and rates its performance against Epic’s high standards. One key measure is the exception rate, a calculation of how often an activity (such as a database query) is completed in a timely fashion. The slower the performance, the higher the exception rate.COMPANY:Atlantic Health System www.atlantichealth.orgUSE CASE:• Virtual Server Infrastructure – Citrix®, VMware® vSphere®• VDI – Citrix XenDesktop® and XenApp®• Database – Cach鮕 EHR – Epic® CHALLENGES:• Impending move to Epic EHR required higher-performing storage platform.• Complex legacy storage systems required constant attention, incurred high maintenance costs.IT TRANSFORMATION:• Processing time for key reports and functions slashed by more than 80%.• Pure Storage delivers 100% uptime, exceeds all Epic requirements for storage performance.• Data-center footprint for storage cut by more than 90%.“Pure Storage is our storage standard. It’s robust, fast, encrypted and replicates well.”Meraz Nasir, Manager of Infrastructure EngineeringPURE STORAGE CASE STUDY | ATLANTIC HEALTH SYSTEM
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