St. Dominic Hospital Chooses Isilon NL NAS

EMC
Corporation announced that St. Dominic Hospital, a 535-bed acute care
facility in Jackson, Mississippi, consolidated its legacy storage
infrastructure onto EMC Isilon scale-out storage to manage its big data
requirements.

With Isilon, St. Dominic’s is enabling faster and more reliable access to
medical images and patient records while supporting 20% annual data growth and
ongoing expansion of the hospital.

Customer
Benefits:

• 
  Performance: Time to retrieve medical
  images has decreased to less than one second as the result of St. Dominic’s
  achieving a 1,000% increase in performance with Isilon.
• Cost Savings:
  Isilon’s performance, simplified administration and increased
  reliability saves St. Dominic’s 50% annually on long-term storage costs.
• Administration: St.
  Dominic’s IT is able to spend less time on IT administration tasks, while
  maintaining 100% uptime and freeing time for projects that help improve
  organizational efficiency and patient care.

Customer
Challenges and Solution:
St. Dominic Hospital’s big data assets were growing
at a rate of 20% annually due to advances in medical imaging technology,
combined with the hospital’s acquisition of a diagnostic imaging center, doctors’
offices and the opening of health clinics. In addition, healthcare reform
required greater use of electronic medical records (EMR), resulting in more
information being captured in electronic patient charts. Aging PACS and EMR
archiving platforms running on legacy storage could no longer scale to meet
growth demands. For example, the hospital’s prior NetApp solution, which housed
home directories, departmental shares and several document management systems,
lacked the performance to service data requests.

After considering solutions from Dell, IBM, NetApp, Scale Computing and EMC,
St. Dominic Hospital selected Isilon, with the help of EMC Velocity
Solution Provider Presidio, for its performance, scalability and ease of
management.

It consolidated its legacy storage environment
onto Isilon NL-Series in two replicated clusters. Isilon supports the
hospital’s McKesson Horizon Patient Folder (HPF) EMR solution, as well as a
vendor-neutral archive based on GE Centricity PACS, storing massive image files
generated by CT-scans, 3D ultrasound, vascular studies, mammography, MRI and
radiology. Nearly one-half billion HPF and PACS files reside on EMC Isilon,
allowing St. Dominic’s to take advantage of EMC Isilon’s exponential performance
growth as it scales.

In addition, St. Dominic’s uses Isilon
InsightIQ performance management, SmartLock data retention, SnapshotIQ data
protection and SyncIQ data replication software.

With Isilon, St. Dominic’s has gained
virtually limitless scalability to enable its adoption of advanced medical
imaging technologies and its expansion with the addition of doctor’s offices
and health clinics. St. Dominic’s also is leveraging Isilon to
significantly lower TCO of its growing infrastructure.

Wendell W. Pinegar, applications
supervisor, St. Dominic Hospital, said: "When we consider the long-term costs associated with our legacy storage
platforms, we will have saved 50% annually on IT-related expenses since
implementing EMC Isilon."

"We
were impressed with the simplicity of EMC Isilon – especially compared to other
vendor’s solutions. Having one name space for our unstructured data, medical
images, home directories and document shares was very attractive and made it
easier to manage. It worked right out of the box without hours of complex
configuration. This was a drastic change from the other storage platforms we
had purchased.

"We
needed a ‘forever’ solution with unlimited scalability. Because our core
mission is patient care, a key design requirement was to maintain two
geographically dispersed storage clusters with separate but identical copies of
our medical images and patient records. Meeting the explosive demands for
growth was also a significant challenge so we also needed to simplify our overall
storage environment. With EMC Isilon’s scale-out storage and advanced software,
we discovered a very painless way to achieve all those requirements.

"In
our McKesson EMR environment, image retrieval times have decreased from up to
six seconds to less than one second. By the time we are fully implemented we
will have achieved a 1,000% increase in overall sustained I/O performance
versus our legacy storage solution.

"When
you have to manage big data such as huge 3D medical image files, we need a
‘forever’ solution like EMC Isilon that allows us to continue growing to meet
our big data needs. Isilon allows us to grow as large as we want and as fast as
we need without over-building our storage. We just add nodes and the cluster
dynamically brings in additional storage with 100% uptime.

"As
far as maintenance, there’s not a lot to do. Since we don’t have to concentrate
on day-to-day management of storage, we have more time to focus on projects
that add value for the hospital. The entire solution is easy to manage and
requires just a few touch points for any task.

"At St. Dominic’s we realize that it’s all
about the patient and we are ever mindful that our purpose is to serve those in
need. Isilon has helped us simplify our infrastructure while improving the
quality of patient care and the overall efficiency of our organization. This
allows us to concentrate on the bigger picture and work toward strategic
improvements within the hospital and we simply couldn’t do that without EMC
Isilon."