11,000 EMC Centera Shipped Worldwide to 5,000 Customers

EMC Centera content addressed storage (CAS) systems have been at the forefront of delivering best-in-class disk-based production archives for numerous customers in varying industries over the past decade. Organizations including Sutter Health, WellStar Health Systems and Plymouth Insurance Group have recently turned to EMC and Centera to meet their archiving requirements, resulting in a reduction in their overall cost of storage while keeping more information online, for greater business value.

EMC Centerra

According to the new EMC-sponsored IDC study titled As the Economy Contracts, the Digital Universe Expands, the amount of digital information created in 2008 grew 3% faster or 16 million gigabytes more, compared with IDC’s prior projection. Looking forward, the Digital Universe is expected to double in size every 18 months. In 2012, five times as much digital information will be created versus 2008. The majority of that information is unstructured content, which Centera was purpose-built to store, protect and access.

The recent passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) includes specific provisions relating to health information technology (HITECH Act) and allocates more than $20 billion of funding to help accelerate the adoption of electronic health record capabilities to deliver safer, patient care. Designed for storing and archiving electronic healthcare records and patient images, EMC Centera CAS active archiving systems are deployed at thousands of healthcare providers worldwide, helping these organizations to comply with HIPAA, Joint Commission, and EU Data Directives for secure records retention.

With 11,000 systems shipped to over 5,000 customers worldwide, shipping more than 370 petabytes (PBs) of storage, Centera provides simple, affordable, and secure information archiving, allowing organizations to make their archives an extension of their primary storage. This allows them to move infrequently or unchanging information to an online production archive at the earliest or most convenient time.

As part of EMC’s Velocity Technology and ISV Partner Program, more than 270 vendors have solutions that integrate with EMC Centera, which provide compelling joint solutions to customers. In addition, EMC is playing an active role in driving new industry standards like the eXtensible Access Method (XAM) specification, which helps customers lower the cost of accessing, retaining and managing data through multi-vendor interoperability.

Customers Turn to EMC Centera for Their Production Archiving and Retention Needs

Healthcare Provider Improves Patient Information Access and Reduces Storage Footprint
Sutter Health, one of the nation’s leading not-for-profit healthcare providers, serving more than 100 Northern California communities – needed to expand its electronic health records infrastructure in order to keep up with information growth it was experiencing due to advances in medicine that are taking place within the organization.

Nina Noldon, Regional Director Diagnostic Imaging at Sutter Health Sacramento Sierra Region, said: "Since 2008 Sutter Health has been on a strategic journey – Destination 2012. This strategy is based on consumer-centric value that delivers high quality, affordable, accessible and consistent services to our customers. As part of this strategy we invest and partner with technology providers to not only improve patient care but also help us reduce our overall cost. In the past years I have personally witnessed not only the rapid growth in the amount of information to be stored but also the total size of the imaging data sets to be stored. Coupled with this has been the need to develop a centralized strategy and schema to store and access medical imaging from outside of the traditional Radiology setting. EMC Centera has allowed Sutter Health in the Sacramento Sierra Region to tackle these challenges head-on and greatly reduce our total cost of storage per Terabyte."

Noldon added: "Our challenge to EMC was to develop a solution that met our long term storage needs, access to the non-traditional medical imaging as well our disaster recovery needs. EMC Centera Gen 4 was the answer. By moving inactive data off primary storage to Centera we’ve been able to maximize our short term shortage reducing the image retrieval turn around time our clinicians’ experience. This is a huge Medical Staff satisfier and can really make a difference in urgent clinical situations. The Gen 4 conversion has reduced our overall power and cooling needs in the Data Center, added significant capacity to both our long term and disaster recovery systems, while reducing the total footprint of the systems. Our experience in the past years related to data integrity also drove our decision. Our experience with EMC Centera assured me of the quality of the information moving to the archive. We know that we can quickly access the data in long term storage and that the archive creates an easy to find permanent trail of the data. As Sutter Health continues on its journey to Destination 2012, we will continue to maximize the ability of Centera as a consolidated archive so we can slice, dice, store and retrieve data in ways we never could before, always with an eye on transforming our organization to meet our patients’ and our communities’ needs for safer, more affordable care."

WellStar Health Systems Partners With EMC
to Standardize Long Term Archiving
In an effort to provide high quality healthcare, WellStar Health Systems looked to streamline its storage and information access in order to deliver the best possible services for the organization’s personnel.

"The ability to make a decision in our business is critical in providing the best patient care possible," said Stephen Edge, Chief Enterprise Architect for WellStar Health System. "For us to improve on information access and fast decision-making, we needed to partner with the best storage provider and EMC was the clear choice in allowing us to store, grow and improve our data center. As a result, we made a strategic decision to use EMC Centera as our foundational platform to archive medical records, images and financial information. By investing in EMC and Centera, WellStar can focus on one system and make sure our other application vendors tie to the system which has allowed us to save significant costs."

"The hybrid approach of using optical, tape and paper files with multiple disparate applications made it very time consuming for users to access and locate files and information," said Edge. "Now with Centera, WellStar has about 100 TBs of archived information so our clinicians can easily access electronic medical records and radiological and heartlabs images. By archiving to Centera, we’ve been able to allocate less primary storage which has helped us save cost and keep the most important data at the finger tips of our users. The bottom line is that Centera works as advertised and we couldn’t be happier. In addition, EMC Professional Services has enabled WellStar to quickly expand and migrate our Centera deployment to accommodate the rapid growth we’ve seen in making all of our information digital."

The vision of WellStar Health System is to deliver world-class healthcare. WellStar Health System is a not-for-profit health system, which includes Cobb, Douglas, Kennestone, Paulding and Windy Hill hospitals; WellStar Physicians Group; Urgent Care Centers; Health Place; Homecare; Hospice; Atherton Place; Paulding Nursing Center; and WellStar Foundation.

Insurance Carrier Reduces Primary Storage Costs
By 84% Through Production Archiving
Plymouth Rock Group of Companies, a regional provider of personal insurance, required an archiving storage tier in order to help in order to maintain superior customer service while reducing spending and simplifying the management of thousands of claims files.

Troy Wood, Storage Team Lead, Shared Technology Services Group, Inc., a Plymouth Rock Company, said :"As we write and manage more than $1 billion in personal and commercial auto and homeowner’s insurance across the Northeast, it’s vital for us to utilize technology in order for us to maintain the highest levels of customer service. We needed to improve our information infrastructure as it related to archiving in order to receive fast information access at a controlled cost, while knowing that information was retained indefinitely for internal and external governance policies. Due to their solutions-centric approach to archiving, we chose EMC Centera along with a number of other EMC solutions, which enabled us to quickly reduce storage costs by quickly offloading data off our EMC Celerra unified storage system onto Centera."

Wood added: "For documents with a last modified stamp older than 90 days, we move the documents from EMC Celerra to Centera with EMC Rainfinity FMA. As a result of this seamless migration and automated archiving, we’ve seen tremendous benefits. Currently, we’ve been able to reduce our Celerra-based storage from 1.7 TBs to 250 GBs, helping us reduce our storage costs by 84%. In addition, by moving older Microsoft Exchange files to Centera, we’ve been able to reduce the primary storage by 66%. At the same time, when employees need information, it’s easily and quickly accessible through Centera. EMC has been invaluable in simplifying our information lifecycle management strategy while reducing cost and improving information access."