Compellent Inceases Presence With Healthcare Providers

At the HIMSS09 event, Compellent Technologies, Inc. announced healthcare customers are overcoming IT challenges and enhancing patient care through better data storage management by implementing the Compellent storage area network (SAN).

"As patient data — images, treatment records, billing and insurance information — continues to grow unabated and become more digitized, healthcare facilities have leveraged intelligent storage environments to reliably manage and protect their data," said Bruce Kornfeld, vice president of marketing, Compellent. "Our healthcare customers have improved patient treatment by using the virtualized storage capabilities of the Compellent SAN, while lowering IT costs due to its ease-of-administration and industry-leading storage efficiency."

Improving Patient Care Through More Efficient Data Storage
Princeton Radiology has always understood the need for a flexible, scalable and efficient storage solution to manage the millions of images it has generated over its 50-year history. With its transition to fully digital operations, storage became an IT issue rather than a facilities issue, which presented a unique opportunity to both better plan for data growth and to strive towards storage of images for the life of the patient. To solve this problem, while minimizing IT administration burdens, Princeton Radiology combines Compellent’s automated tiered storage and thin provisioning software. These technologies dynamically migrate more than 85 percent of Princeton Radiology’s data, which is inactive, to lower storage tiers in the Compellent SAN, where it is anticipated to remain available and easily accessible for the lifetime of the patients.

"Princeton Radiology specializes in all sorts of digital imaging technologies for the diagnosis, treatment and research of disease, including X-rays, MRIs, PET/CT scans, mammograms and ultrasounds, and over time, that data adds up," said Alan Howard, director of information technology, Princeton Radiology. "The Compellent SAN gives us the capacity and the management applications to expand our system quickly and keep patient data online and available, so we can provide them with timely and accurate diagnoses and treatment."

As one of the first fully digital hospitals in the United States, Kansas Spine Hospital LLC relies on state-of-the-art imaging equipment to diagnose conditions and perform delicate spinal and orthopedic procedures. Given the critical importance of its picture archive communication system (PACS) for both doctors and patients, Kansas Spine Hospital chose the Compellent SAN in large part due to its cost-effective disaster recovery capabilities built on continuous snapshots and thin replication software. In the event of a data loss, the IT team can recover data in minutes by automating failover and recovery from three sites as needed. By choosing the Compellent SAN, the hospital estimates that it saved approximately 85 percent of the acquisition costs for an alternate backup and recovery solution, while providing unmatched security to the data the hospital’s doctors require to provide proper care.

"Kansas Spine Hospital was founded with a keen focus on using state-of-the-art technologies and applications for superior patient care," said Mike Knocke, CIO, Kansas Spine Hospital. "Not only does the Compellent SAN give us the storage solution our doctors and nurses need to effectively provide patient care, but it also protects data. Even in the event of a loss, we still have the information and images our staff needs to diagnose and treat conditions, right at their fingertips."

Pacific Hospital of Long Beach is a full-service teaching hospital whose mission is to assure patients of calm, homelike surroundings while providing technologically advanced acute patient treatment. The hospital chose the Compellent SAN for its high performance, thin provisioning and virtualization capabilities. By combining Compellent storage virtualization with VMware server virtualization, the hospital eliminated 75 percent of its physical servers and maximizes existing IT assets. Through thin provisioning, the hospital allocates storage capacity up-front, but only consumes physical capacity when data is written, enabling it to purchase storage on-demand.