Be The Match Leverages NetApp Technology

The
exponential growth of data provides a wealth of information that, if managed
and analysed effectively, can result in innovations and discoveries that
affect our world. Nowhere is this truer than in the health care field, where
the right data analysis can lead to new findings that change lives
in an instant. The key to unlocking this data is technology. Without it, many
of today’s life-saving medical advances would not be possible.

For Be The Match, which
operates the world’s largest listing of potential marrow donors and donated
cord blood units, data is life. Thousands of patients with life-threatening
diseases like leukemia, lymphoma, and sickle cell disease need a marrow
transplant every year but don’t have a match in their family.

Operated by the
nonprofit National Marrow Donor Program, Be The Match helps connect these
patients with donors. The organisation understood that to save more lives, it
needed a technology foundation that would act as an enabler, not a constraint.
That’s why Be The Match is built on NetApp, Inc..

"The ability to make faster decisions and to
analyse information in real time has a direct impact on the lives of our
patients, making our storage platform a critical piece to our success,"
said Michael Jones, chief information officer of Be The Match. "With NetApp, we have been able to greatly
accelerate the flow of data, which has enabled us to facilitate 50% more
transplants around the world. NetApp has been instrumental in helping us save
more lives."

By giving
patients access to a registry of more than 15 million donors and 400,000
umbilical cord blood units, Be The Match helps facilitate thousands of
potentially life-saving transplants every year. Transplant doctors search its
Be The Match Registry using a sophisticated matching algorithm application that
is 100 million times more complex than blood typing programs. Since 2007, the
number of transplants facilitated per year has risen steadily, from 3,700 to
5,500. Be The Match has set a goal to facilitate 10,000 by 2015. This growth, coupled with the sheer complexity and volume of data,
triggered the organisation to transform its existing IT infrastructure with
NetApp storage at its core. Be The Match was able to
turn its IT environment into a catalyst for life-saving speed and flexibility.

NetApp Helps
Be The Match
Push the Envelope of What Is Possible
As a result
of its overall transformation program, Be The Match realised a number of
benefits that allowed it to speed the process of discovery, extend its global
reach, and create more accurate matches, directly helping the organisation save
more lives.

Highlights
include:

• A newly integrated application suite,
  which includes consolidating Be The Match data onto a NetApp platform, has
  allowed the organisation to reduce the time to transplant by 15%. Because many
  patients have diseases that can progress very quickly, the window of
  opportunity to identify a donor and perform a transplant can be as small as
  months or even weeks. Cutting the time to transplant helps patients move more
  quickly through the transplant process and improves their chance of survival.
• Be The Match has doubled its annual
  donor registrations by building a new donor recruitment portal as a result of
  its shared IT infrastructure on NetApp. The new portal helped increase annual
  donor registrations, from an average of 360,000 per year from 2000 to 2008 to
  about 850,000 for the last two years. The more potential donors Be The Match has access to, the
  higher the likelihood that a patient will find a match.
• NetApp is able to deliver the
  performance and bandwidth that Be The Match requires to complete
  complex analytics and to run 10 times more concurrent matching algorithm
  searches than on its legacy storage. The result helps improve matching accuracy
  and boost survival rates.
• NetApp’s capabilities have enabled Be The Match to reduce capacity requirements by 900TB
  and simplify overall management, allowing it to scale from 65TB to
  350TB without adding resources. The efficiency gains also enable the
  organisation to lower overall storage costs.
• Moving to a NetApp foundation has
  enabled Be The Match to improve information visibility and sharing across
  applications and user groups, which is critical for its partner network of 525
  affiliated organisations in 40 countries. Because nearly half of all
  transplants involve an international donor or recipient, Be The Match will make
  its services available to its affiliates via a private cloud built on NetApp.

Jeffrey W.
Chell, M.D., chief executive officer of Be The Match, said: "Technology
is critical to Be The Match’s success. NetApp has removed the technology barriers
and enabled us to forge ahead with our ambitious transplant goals. We are
confident that with NetApp at the core of our IT infrastructure, Be The Match
will be able to continue to push the envelope of what is possible with cellular
therapy and help save more lives around the world."

Rob Salmon,
executive vice president of Field Operations, NetApp, said: "The work that Be The Match does is
incredible and has touched so many lives around the world. For Be The Match,
data is the most precious resource, and their IT transformation has
revolutionised the way they work and the research they can conduct. To have
NetApp serve as the foundation for the new infrastructure is proof that the
right technology can truly help save lives."