Blood Systems Selecting HP 3par StoreServ Storage

Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. announced that Blood Systems, Inc., the second-largest blood bank in the US, has selected its 3PAR StoreServ Storage to maximize data capacity and improve performance of mission-critical applications.

January marks a critical time of year for blood donations, recognized as National Blood Donor Month, and Blood Systems supports 10% of the nation’s blood supply through donation centers across 18 states. Every pint of blood the organization obtains is tracked by manufacturing and logistics software as it passes through lab testing and to final disposition at one of 500 hospitals across the country.

Blood Systems’ legacy storage architecture was unable to accommodate the organization’s increasing data capacity and performance demands. Improved scalability in the HP solution aided with application uptime and lower latency improved critical workflow processes.

By upgrading its data center to 3PAR StoreServ Storage, Blood Systems has improved the performance of its business-critical applications, which now run 80% faster (based on client results.) With the increased capacity, it can more easily add donation centers to its current manufacturing and logistics program, while accommodating plans to consolidate data from affiliate organizations.

“We needed a storage solution that would enable Blood Systems to expand while improving efficiency within a not-for-profit organization’s budget parameters,” said Alain Black, manager, IT systems, Blood Systems. “The scalability and performance power of HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage allows us to meet future growth requirements and lower IT and companywide operational expenses.“

 3PAR StoreServ Storage with SSDs has improved application performance for Blood Systems, enabling it to streamline operations. Financial-reporting time has decreased from 24 hours to two hours, and employees can complete payroll processing during regular business hours, saving Blood Systems thousands of dollars in overtime pay.

3PAR Peer Motion storage federation features quickly move, redistribute or balance data workloads among 3PAR StoreServ arrays at the master data-center level without business disruption. Blood Systems no longer needs to manage individual storage devices at disparate locations, which has resulted in reduced TCO while enabling IT resources to focus on strategic initiatives.

Transparently shifting data to systems with available capacity through federated 3PAR thin provisioning software has reduced the organization’s allocated storage consumption by 60%. This minimizes the need to purchase additional SSDs and FC disks, saving the organization money and increasing performance.

3PAR Adaptive Optimization Software delivers automatic storage-tiering capabilities that have increased the organization’s capacity utilization. Blood Systems also has eliminated manual administration of data across storage tiers, thereby reducing data center management costs.

“Not-for-profit healthcare organizations must protect medical records and ensure persistent availability of applications vital to saving lives, while often operating on IT budgets tighter than businesses half their size,” said Chris Riley, VP Americas, storage, HP. “In addition to ensuring persistent BC critical to Blood Systems and its medical partners to support the nation’s blood supply, HP 3PAR StoreServ has lowered the organization’s TCO by eliminating application downtime to maximize organization wide productivity.“