Atlantic Health System Chooses Pure Storage

Atlantic Health System (AHS) standardized on Pure Storage, Inc. solutions to ensure the performance of its mission-critical applications, including its Epic electronic health record (EHR) system, as well as to meet its growing backup and rapid restore requirements.

This implementation cut the demands on IT staff for storage management and is expected to save AHS more than $1 million over six years funds that can be applied for strategic investment that further elevates care.

AHS is a non-profit New Jersey organization with 4 hospitals, more than 1,600 beds, relationships with thousands of practitioners statewide and programs across numerous fields. The IT team works to ensure that physicians and care providers have instant access to the information they need, so they can spend more time focused on patients and not worry about technology.

When AHS made the decision to move to Epic for its EHR needs, the IT staff took the opportunity to evaluate its data foundation – including latency and ability to scale. While AHS planned to first deploy Epic in out-patient environments, the intent was to expand its use to in-patient settings. This move would increase the number of end-users from less than 1,000 to approximately 16,000. AHS needed a data foundation that could scale to meet that demand without unnecessary costs, interruptions or management complexity. After initially evaluating its incumbent storage vendor, it chose Pure Storage.

“Performance was paramount in our evaluation process. Pure Storage also stood above the crowd with several other benefits as well – including simplicity of deployment and management, scalability, flexibility, and Pure’s Evergreen Storage model. These factors combined made Pure the clear choice,” said Pat Zinno, director of infrastructure services and support, AHS.

Since installing Pure flash arrays to support its Epic environment, AHS has achieved 100% availability. Epic sets a threshold for acceptable storage bandwidth of 1,500Mb/s for reads and 300Mb/s for writes. In pre-production testing of Pure arrays on a subset of hospital operations, performance results reached 3,000Mb/s (reads) and 600Mb/s (writes), with latencies also below Epic thresholds. These performance levels have remained constant even as AHS continues to add new users and workloads.

In addition, over a 2-year period, AHS grew the number of users on its Citrix XenApp infrastructure running on Pure arrays from less than 1,000 to around 16,000, while maintaining performance across the entire platform, so that the user experience stayed consistent the entire time. Today, that number is close to 20,000, with around 7,000 concurrent users at any one time.

Pure’s impact also extends to AHS’ business critical functions, such as the daily ETL process that takes all the data from the production Caché database and moves it into the Epic Clarity and Caboodle databases, which are used to generate reports on all aspects of the organization’s operations. In the weeks before deploying Pure, the nightly ETL averaged 5.5 hours. On the first day running, ETL finished in 20 minutes – a reduction of 94%.

Pure’s Evergreen Storage Improves Savings for AHS
While improvements affecting patient care are the most important benefits of the move to Pure Storage, cost savings also have been significant.

“For a time, storage was the number one capital and operating expense we had, but with Pure we’ve now been able to not only level out that spending, but reduce the maintenance costs,” Zinno said.

“Atlantic Health System serves as a great example for hospital systems looking to transform their business and patient experience through a modern data infrastructure. High-performing, scalable storage delivers critical health information to clinicians faster, supporting AHS in its goal to deliver award-winning care as it continues to grow,” said Josh Gluck, VP of global healthcare technology strategy, Pure Storage. “Pure’s Evergreen Storage program also saves AHS millions of dollars in capital expense and operating expense, and the flexible subscription model allows it to protect its investment for the long term.“

Pure’s Evergreen Storage program provides customers non-disruptive access to the its technology without forklift upgrades and with preservation of investment in Pure solutions. AHS estimates that the TCO with Pure will result in savings of more than $1.3 million over 6 years.