Excelero Enabling CMA Consulting Services to Deliver Time-To-Market Advantage for More Healthcare Teams

Excelero, Inc., in software-defined block storage, said that IT consulting practice CMA Consulting Services has helped more healthcare organisations to achieve time-to-market advantage by deploying Excelero’s NVMesh server SAN within CMA’s MicroTerabyte ‘data warehouse in a box’ solutions.

As hospitals, healthcare providers and payers embrace advanced analytics applications in the search for new treatments and insights, CMA found NVMesh to deliver the agile, exceptionally performance, low-latency storage infrastructure that CMA needs as the foundation of its Oracle RAC cluster-based analytics offerings. NVMesh’s benefits flow to both users of CMA’s hosted MicroTerabyte solution, and its on-demand Dynamic Analytics Platform (DAP) database as a service (DBaaS) offering.

“Healthcare organisations have an insatiable need for advanced analytics yet getting efficient performance from large databases demands a storage infrastructure with high performance and ultra-low latency. Excelero’s NVMesh software delivered beyond our expectations,” said Brian Dougherty, chief technical architect, CMA. “Because of its flexibility and scalability, we deployed NVMesh in just two days, versus several weeks for DSSD – 80% faster. The time we saved can help our customers get started sooner with important medical research and finding new ways to control healthcare costs.“

With 28% CAGR for population health analytics deployments alone (BCC Research, November 2017), CMA experienced strong uptake right out of the gate with its MicroTerabyte and DAP DBaaS offerings, which are also used in clinical analytics, healthcare reimbursement analytics and fraud detection. When Dell EMC announced the end of life of the DSSD storage solution in spring 2017, CMA needed something far more scalable to replace DSSD. It elected to follow the lead of ‘Tech Giants’ in using commodity hardware and software-defined stacks in MicroTerabyte instead of proprietary hardware and software, both for clients’ agility and its own.

“NVMesh performance was stellar on half-dozen or so units to start – from 50TB to 100TB each – with an Oracle RAC 12c benchmark using Excelero providing the fastest table space creation time of any storage hardware platform CMA has ever tested. Administration is easy, and the time-savings just continue as we scale,” Dougherty said.

In using CMA’s solutions powered by NVMesh, MicroTerabyte users self-provision their data – no shipping encrypted drives, no requisitioning time – with point- click-and-ship ease. They can iterate endlessly on hundreds of terabytes of data, expediting both time to results and time to market with their ideas. Hospitals and healthcare organisations avoid the need for database administrators (DBAs), significant data centre equipment and conversion teams to write scripts for performing analytics queries.

In a benchmark to quickly build, test and execute a suite of Oracle RAC 12c database benchmarks based on a MicroTerabyte V2 architecture and powered by Dell and storage, and Excelero NVMesh, testing showed a single 20TB Oracle 12c big file table space was created in 1 hour, 3 minutes and 41s. This is a rate of about 1/3TB/mn. The result was 3 times faster than the previous highest performing storage node CMA had ever tested, Dougherty explained, and up to 10 times faster than alternative storage nodes.

“New application workloads are making database requirements more complex, with a steady increase of I/O operations demanding more performance,” said Greg Schulz, principal, Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC, an industry analyst and consultancy. “Next-generation software defined storage such as Excelero are examples of the data infrastructure solutions available to meet the needs of the database industry and support applications like CMA is providing.“

“In fast-growing markets like healthcare IT, organisations either rely on solutions built for agility and flexibility, or someone else will do the same and capture a market opportunity first,” said Lior Gal, CEO and co-founder, Excelero. “We’re incredibly proud that our NVMesh solution met CMA’s stringent demands and are eager to continue helping CMA and its customers grow their ability to do more sophisticated and timely analyses, with less infrastructure and hassle.“