Cardinal Innovations Customer of PernixData

PernixData, Inc., in virtualizing server flash, announced that Cardinal Innovations Healthcare Solutions, a Managed Care Organization (MCO) located in North Carolina, has selected PernixData FVP to process claims faster and cost-effectively scale storage in order to keep pace with the demands and changes in the healthcare industry.

Cardinal Innovations manages Medicaid, state, and local funding for behavioral health services, covering 2.4 million individuals and more than 1,000 service providers in the state of North Carolina. With additional growth a possibility, the company needed to improve IT efficiency so it would be able to adapt and grow cost to align with the new demands.

“There’s a good chance that the number of transactions I need to process will grow by more than two thirds in the coming months as we scale up,” said Chad Currier, technology infrastructure director, Cardinal. “To keep pace with the additional claims would require continual investments in storage hardware, and we wanted to do everything possible to avoid that.“

In addition to claims expected to grow substantially, Cardinal must ensure its DR plan can hit a target of 2ms latency-a goal that would be challenging with its existing storage infrastructure. Currier knew he needed both storage capacity and storage performance, but he didn’t want the two to be linked and result in the same challenges year after year.

He turned to his solutions provider, Varrow, Inc., for options that suggested two options. The first choice was the traditional route: buy a new high-end SAN. The second choice was to deploy a lower cost storage array for capacity/data services and utilize PernixData FVP with Intel SSDs for maximum storage performance. PernixData FVP clusters server flash into a logical pool of resources that are used to accelerate reads and writes to primary storage.

With no prior experience with PernixData’s software, Currier decided to try it out in a free proof-of-concept. He found that installing and deploying PernixData FVP was easy. The product installed in minutes and required no specific training or VMware expertise to get up and running. Once PernixData FVP was installed, Currier began to see 6x improvement in IO/s.

Convinced that using server-side flash with a PernixData Flash Hypervisor would deliver excellent storage performance, Currier decided to do a detailed cost-benefit analysis of the two options. He found the solution leveraging server side flash with PernixData FVP not only delivered 6x more IO/s and 26% additional capacity than the proposed high end SAN, but at half the cost. In addition to cost savings, Currier get the ability to scale his storage performance going forward.

“In a perfect world I can address performance and capacity as two distinct issues with two distinct solutions. That’s what PernixData provides and is the only way I can get the flexibility I need without breaking the bank,” said Currier. “I now have the capacity I need for future growth and I can scale storage performance quickly and cost effectively as the company grows.“