 NMHC pauses to refresh storage
Rapid growth is a constant at pharmacy benefits manager National Medical Health Card Systems Inc. (NMHC). After growing at 35 to 40 percent per year, the company recently decided to take advantage of a pause to evaluate, update and rationalize its storage infrastructure.
NMHC was looking for increased capacity, improved performance and the deployment of tiered storage. Its decision: upgrade to HP StorageWorks XP24000 Disk Arrays, which supply capacity to applications from a pool of virtualized storage and allocate physical capacity as needed.
Now NMHC has expanded capacity that will scale easily with future rapid growth. The XP24000s share the same fabric with existing HP infrastructure, which means data is easy to move. The new three-tiered storage accommodates mission-critical data on the XP24000s, near-mission-critical data and applications on a StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA), and development work, QA and archiving data on Modular Smart Array (MSA) enclosures. HP Continuous Access Software is used to make storage and applications available in NMHC’s disaster recovery site 1,200 miles away.
Staying ahead
Arkansas Children’s Hospital uses MEDITECH for core hospital applications and other systems. Its server-attached storage was having trouble keeping up with the growth in data volumes: the hospital needed a solution that could keep pace while reducing downtime, cut storage and other IT costs, improve fault tolerance and work with MEDITECH.
The hospital selected HP Enterprise Virtual Arrays (EVAs) for their superior features and performance. With two sites each equipped with two EVAs, data can now be replicated between sites, an effective redundant storage environment. Coupled with HP StorageWorks Continuous Access EVA Software, the solution has cut downtime, improved failover reliability and provided scalable storage for future growth.
EVA stars in storage overhaul
A storage upgrade at Prairie Cardiovascular Consultants (PCC), a leader in cardiovascular care, has improved storage performance, reduced costs, and helped improve patient care. At the center of the turnaround was an HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) 8100.
PCC’s existing SAN had reached capacity, and besides being outdated it couldn’t scale to meet growing demand. The company needed more capacity, easier management and scalability, and affordable high-bandwidth access to mission-critical servers. Performance was also critical given the need to load data-intensive medical images and records.
PCC picked the EVA8100 for reliability, performance, ease of use and rich feature set. Particular attractions were the high-speed Fibre Channel (FC) disk drives and lower-cost Fibre Attached Technology Adapted (FATA) drives. HP’s service and warranty offerings also helped tip the scales.
With the help of value-added reseller Novanis, which partnered with HP on the implementation in addition to providing pre-deployment test and implementation plans, PCC implemented the EVA8100 in tandem with an overall network upgrade.
Storage is now easy to manage and highly scalable, enabling growth rather than holding it back. Medical staff productivity has also improved, and projected ROI is an impressive 851 percent.
Taking care of storage
Gwinnett Medical Center (GMC) serves Gwinnett County in Georgia, one of the fastest growing counties in the United States. In recent years, near-constant 100 percent occupancy levels have led GMC to expand facilities—and to make the most efficient possible use of information technology.
GMC relies on its HP Medical Archive Solution (MAS) and HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA), which it adopted when it moved to a SAN environment. These tools have enabled GMC to scale from around 1TB of total storage five years ago to 250TB today while consolidating and virtualizing infrastructure to make maximum use of space, reduce power and cooling costs, and enable more efficient IT management.
The HP storage and archive solutions enable Gwinnett to scale storage rapidly, as needed and without interrupting service to patients, physicians and administrators. “With the HP EVA’s virtualized storage and the MAS grid architecture we can simply snap in new storage whenever we need it—grow on demand,” says Rick Allen, GMC’s Assistant Vice President, Information Systems. “We never have too much or too little.”
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