St. Dominic Hospital Treats Explosive Big Data and Home Directory Growth with EMC

HOPKINTON, Mass., Feb. 6, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) today announced that St. Dominic Hospital, a 535-bed acute care facility in Jackson, Mississippi, consolidated its legacy storage infrastructure onto EMC^® Isilon^® scale-out storage to manage its Big Data requirements. With EMC Isilon, St. Dominic's is enabling dramatically faster and more reliable access to medical images and patient records while supporting 20% annual data growth and ongoing expansion of the hospital.

Customer Benefits:

• Improved Performance -- Time to retrieve medical images has decreased to less than one second as the result of St. Dominic's achieving a 1,000% increase in performance with EMC Isilon.
• Significant Cost Savings -- EMC Isilon's high performance, simplified administration and increased reliability saves St. Dominic's 50% annually on long-term storage costs.
• Simplified Administration -- St. Dominic's IT is able to spend less time on IT administration tasks, while maintaining 100% uptime and freeing time for projects that help improve organizational efficiency and patient care.

Customer Challenges and Solution:

St. Dominic Hospital's Big Data assets were growing at a rate of 20% annually due to advances in medical imaging technology, combined with the hospital's acquisition of a diagnostic imaging center, doctors' offices and the opening of health clinics. In addition, healthcare reform required greater use of electronic medical records (EMR), resulting in more information being captured in electronic patient charts. Aging PACS and EMR archiving platforms running on legacy storage could no longer scale to meet growth demands. For example, the hospital's prior NetApp solution, which housed home directories, departmental shares and several document management systems, lacked the performance to service data requests.

After considering solutions from Dell, IBM, NetApp, Scale Computing and EMC, St. Dominic Hospital selected EMC Isilon, with the help of EMC Velocity™ Solution Provider Presidio, for its performance, scalability and ease of management. St. Dominic's Hospital consolidated its legacy storage environment onto EMC Isilon NL-Series in two replicated clusters. EMC Isilon supports the hospital's McKesson Horizon Patient Folder (HPF) EMR solution, as well as a vendor-neutral archive based on GE Centricity PACS, storing massive image files generated by CT-scans, 3D ultrasound, vascular studies, mammography, MRI and radiology. Nearly one-half billion HPF and PACS files reside on EMC Isilon, allowing St. Dominic's to take advantage of EMC Isilon's exponential performance growth as it scales.

In addition, St. Dominic's uses EMC Isilon InsightIQ® performance management, SmartLock® data retention, SnapshotIQ™ data protection and SyncIQ® data replication software.

With EMC Isilon, St. Dominic's has gained virtually limitless scalability to enable its adoption of advanced medical imaging technologies and its expansion with the addition of doctor's offices and health clinics. St. Dominic's also is leveraging EMC Isilon to significantly lower total cost of ownership of its growing infrastructure.

Customer Quotes:

Wendell W. Pinegar, Applications Supervisor, St. Dominic Hospital

"When we consider the long-term costs associated with our legacy storage platforms, we will have saved 50% annually on IT-related expenses since implementing EMC Isilon."

"We were impressed with the simplicity of EMC Isilon – especially compared to other vendor's solutions. Having one name space for our unstructured data, medical images, home directories and document shares was very attractive and made it easier to manage. It worked right out of the box without hours of complex configuration. This was a drastic change from the other storage platforms we had purchased."

"We needed a 'forever' solution with unlimited scalability. Because our core mission is patient care, a key design requirement was to maintain two geographically dispersed storage clusters with separate but identical copies of our medical images and patient records. Meeting the explosive demands for growth was also a significant challenge so we also needed to simplify our overall storage environment. With EMC Isilon's scale-out storage and advanced software, we discovered a very painless way to achieve all those requirements."

"In our McKesson EMR environment, image retrieval times have decreased from up to six seconds to less than one second. By the time we are fully implemented we will have achieved a 1,000% increase in overall sustained I/O performance versus our legacy storage solution."

"When you have to manage Big Data such as huge 3D medical image files, we need a 'forever' solution like EMC Isilon that allows us to continue growing to meet our Big Data needs. Isilon allows us to grow as large as we want and as fast as we need without over-building our storage. We just add nodes and the cluster dynamically brings in additional storage with 100% uptime."

"As far as maintenance, there's not a lot to do. Since we don't have to concentrate on day-to-day management of storage, we have more time to focus on projects that add value for the hospital. The entire solution is easy to manage and requires just a few touch points for any task."

"At St. Dominic's we realize that it's all about the patient and we are ever mindful that our purpose is to serve those in need. Isilon has helped us simplify our infrastructure while improving the quality of patient care and the overall efficiency of our organization. This allows us to concentrate on the bigger picture and work toward strategic improvements within the hospital and we simply couldn't do that without EMC Isilon."

Additional Resources:

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About EMC

EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing.  Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyze their most valuable asset -- information -- in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way. Additional information about EMC can be found at www.EMC.com.

EMC, Velocity, InsightIQ, Isilon, SmartLock, SnapshotIQ and SyncIQ are either registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners.

SOURCE EMC Corporation