MedWest Health System Got EMC VNX

EMC Corporation
announced that MedWest Health System, an health provider in Western North
Carolina operating three hospital campuses and four outpatient facilities,
replaced its Dell EqualLogic environment and has standardized its IT
infrastructure on EMC technologies, including VNX unified storage with the FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) Suite.

MedWest selected VNX to increase the performance of its critical applications, such as McKesson Paragon
hospital information system (HIS), Allscripts electronic health record (EHR)
system, DR Systems PACS solution, Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server.
Additionally, the health provider is also leveraging EMC Avamar for backup and
recovery, EMC Unisphere for simplified management and EMC RecoverPoint for
replication and recovery.

Customer Benefits:

• Agility: MedWest can now set up application environments in
  just a couple of hours compared to weeks, enabling IT to more effectively
  support the healthcare provider’s strategic goals.
• Performance: VNX FAST Suite has enabled MedWest to increase performance of its IT infrastructure.
• Data Backup: Achieving a 98% deduplication rate with
  Avamar, MedWest has reduced backup times by more than 85%, completing daily full
  backups in just three hours compared to a continuous 24×7 backup process with
  its previous tape solution while reducing weekly backup administration time
  from five hours to just 5-10 minutes.

Customer Challenges and Solution:
MedWest had seen its data assets increase due
to its acquisition of new physician practices and implementing new clinical and
business applications to support the U.S. federal government’s increasing
‘meaningful use’ reporting requirements for Electronic Medical Records (EMRs).

Replacing 100 TB of Dell EqualLogic, MedWest has standardized
on EMC technologies to improve performance of
its IT infrastructure. MedWest also uses EMC Unisphere management software to manage its EMC unified storage and EMC RecoverPoint for disaster recovery. To
maximize the performance of its applications, MedWest is using a ‘FLASH 1^st‘
strategy, leveraging the FAST Suite. In addition, MedWest replaced its
Bridgehead and Tivoli Storage Manager backup software and tape systems with
Avamar deduplication backup software and system.

"From a utilization standpoint, our
virtualized VNX infrastructure is phenomenal. We are helping our hospital clinicians
and administrators work faster and more effectively," said Greg Copen, Chief Information Officer, MedWest. "When it comes to
managing, storing and protecting our information, EMC is always the first call
we make. The products are rock solid-everything just works."

Bill Driver, Systems Administrator, MedWest, said: "It seems every other week we’re asked to
support new applications. We now can get these environments set up within hours
instead of the weeks it used to take. Our infrastructure is no longer a
bottleneck. EMC is allowing us to grow our environment at the pace our
management expects so we can support our company’s strategic goals."

"The FAST Suite gives us
the extra boost we need during peak periods by automatically moving data to
Flash drives. It gives us peace of mind knowing that when we add a physician
practice or install an application requiring a lot of resources, we don’t have
to worry about performance."

"We have achieved a
duplication rate of 98% with Avamar and we’re completing full daily backups in
just about three hours. Before, with tape, our backups were running 24×7; one
backup would complete and another would kick off. I used to spend five hours
weekly on backup administration, but with Avamar, now spend five or ten minutes
a week on backup administration."