Healthcare Providers Tap All-Flash From Pure Storage

Pure Storage, Inc. announced that the FlashArray product family continues to be adopted by worldwide healthcare organizations who require a simple, resilient and responsive storage solution for clinical applications in order to drive an enhanced care experience for patients.

Healthcare organizations seeking technology solutions to help them differentiate their services and deliver better patient care are increasingly relying on Pure Storage.

The need for technology that can support a more holistic care model has been amplified, as global healthcare organizations look to extract rich, real-time analysis from patient data. The FlashArray product family supports access through its rapid response times which shorten the amount of time for a physician to begin attending to a patient and allows them to spend more time delivering quality care. Additionally, Pure Storage satisfies growth and performance requirements for applications such as electronic health records and VDI, which continue to rise as more patient data is added into the electronic health system.

According to an April 2015 commissioned¹ Total Economic Impact study of Pure Storage FlashArray storage solutions for healthcare, conducted by Forrester Research, Inc. on behalf of Pure Storage, organizations that have implemented Pure Storage solutions have experienced significant cost savings but also measurable technology and business efficiency improvements. The study calculates the total benefits associated with deploying FlashArray solutions for healthcare were more than $1.9 million over three years. It stated that organizations achieved benefits ranging from increased clinician productivity, flexibility to upgrade and add capacity without migrating data, simplification of deployment and management tasks, as well as power and cooling savings.

IT departments play a central role as healthcare organizations grow their use of electronic health records to improve patient care and data security standards. ‘Meaningful use’ is a government regulation that requires healthcare providers to use certified EHR technology to improve the quality of care and care coordination, while maintaining the privacy and security of patient health information. This regulation has raised standards for EHR technology, putting increased demand on IT environments in healthcare organizations, which Pure Storage’s next generation all flash storage platforms can adequately address.

“We understand that our healthcare customers’ utmost priority is to differentiate themselves through providing better patient care, and we’re focused on helping them accelerate those possibilities. Our technology is designed to deliver the clinical application performance and reliability needed to support the mission-critical applications, such as Epic, Allscripts, McKesson, VMware and Citrix, that their businesses – and patients – depend on,” said Jonathan Martin, CMO, Pure Storage. “With Pure Storage, healthcare organizations benefit from not only significant capital and operational cost savings, but more peace of mind that they will always have access to their data, will never have to experience downtime and the implications that has on the patient’s experience.“

Contra Costa Health Services (CCHS) has served the health needs for people in the county for 40 years with the mission to provide high quality services to the residents of Contra Costa County with respect and responsiveness to all. It is an integrated system of health care services, community health improvement and environmental protection with a record of anticipating community health needs and changing to meet those needs. CCHS uses Pure Storage to run its mission critical Epic and VDI applications.

“After over a year in production, I can say Pure has surpassed my expectations for performance, availability and simplicity,” said Jeffrey Tang, CTO, CCHS. “It is the simplicity factor that continues to amaze us and pays dividends for the team. Storage has become a background technology allowing us to focus on other projects impactful to improving patient care.“

Riverview Health is a regional healthcare provider in Noblesville, IN, with 156 patient beds and 26 remote facilities throughout Hamilton and Tipton counties. Riverview implemented Pure Storage in 2012 to solve inconsistent performance problems it was experiencing from its current hybrid storage array.

Riverview Health experienced reduced storage latency and performance spikes for both SQL and VDI workloads. After migrating to Pure Storage’s all-flash array, Riverview’s virtualized EHR SQL database nearly doubled in IO/s while experiencing a reduction in latency from 2ms-8ms down to less than 1ms. In 2014, It leveraged Pure Storage’s Evergreen Storage model to non-disruptively upgrade both controllers to the latest versions. It worked with a Pure Storage systems engineer during normal business hours and was able to replace two physical storage controllers, triple physical capacity and upgrade all firmware with no disruption in service.

“Performing a non-disruptive upgrade of our Pure Storage flash array on a Tuesday morning was liberating,” said Jason Pearce, director of information systems infrastructure, Riverview Health. “BC, ease of administration, consistent read and write performance, and some of the best technical support we’ve experienced from any vendor are primary reasons why we turn to Pure Storage. In addition to running our EHR and VDI infrastructure, more than 90% of our virtualized workloads now run on Pure Storage.“

St. Luke’s Health System is a not-for-profit health system based in Idaho that cares for more than 163,000 patients each year. Founded in 1902, it has served the Boise, ID community for more than 100 years and has grown into one of the top 15 healthcare systems in the country with 12 major facilities. St Luke’s uses Epic Healthcare’s EHR software and was looking for ways to make Epic perform better and improve availability.

The mission of St. Luke’s Health System is to improve the health of the people in the region. The IT department is helping to fulfill this mission by providing care practitioners with technologies that are simple, secure and that come with support.

“Pure Storage removes complexity from our environment, reduces cost and increases performance,” said Brett Taylor, director of IT infrastructure and operations, St. Luke’s Health System. “Pure was simple to install and manage. We’ve put the technology to the test and it keeps working time after time, which is exactly what we need from our storage system.“

University of Kansas Hospital (UKH) is an academic medical center located in Kansas City, KS. It has more than 650 patient beds and provides services to a population of more than two million. The hospital was searching for a storage solution that would provide their Epic EHR environment with the best combination of performance, cost and simplicity with little to no IT changes. Pure Storage was chosen by UKH for providing a non-disruptive upgrade architecture, data reduction, as well as not needing professional services or management training to install or maintain the FlashArray, which is a substantial cost savings.

Pure Storage technology provided the University of Kansas with an enterprise-ready, cost-effective alternative to their traditional storage technology. Rather than simply meeting performance needs, UKH has exceeded performance requirements and is well equipped for the future.

“Our team’s first priority is to find new ways to help our clinicians improve our patient’s experience,” said Mike Schlenk, assistant director of server design/development and enterprise storage, UKH. “Pure Storage allows the team to spend more time on projects that contribute to this focus and ultimately help provide a better experience to patients as well as clinicians at the University of Kansas Hospital.“

¹Forrester Consulting, Total Economic Impact Study of Pure Storage FlashArray Storage Solutions for Healthcare, April 2015.