New Zealand’s St George’s Hospital Accelerates Access to Critical Healthcare Applications with Pure Storage
One of New Zealand’s largest private hospitals significantly improves storage and data management with Pure’s modern data solutions
Christchurch, New Zealand – July 26, 2022 — Pure Storage (NYSE: PSTG), the IT pioneer that delivers the world’s most advanced data storage technology and services, has modernised St George’s Hospital data storage environment to ensure round-the-clock, high-speed access to critical patient information.
Established in the early 1920s and opened in 1928, Christchurch-based St George’s Hospital is one of the largest private hospitals in New Zealand and has charity status. The hospital invests heavily in technology and innovation to position itself at the forefront of medical service delivery.
Faced with a significant challenge around patient and other mission critical data management during COVID19, and the overall expansion in the amount and complexity of mission critical data, the hospital’s IT team embarked on a digital transformation program in 2020. A strategic review of its data and storage environment confirmed that the organisation had an opportunity to migrate from traditional paper-based records to a digital platform. Additionally, St George’s was facing end-of-life for some of its key hardware, during a period of ongoing digital growth and amid increased concerns around cyber security.
The review revealed that St George’s legacy storage environment struggled to meet growing capacity needs. Its end-of-life storage environment caused speed and performance issues, and future digital transformation plans required greater storage scalability.
St George’s Hospital had invested significantly in digital systems over the past decade and needed their storage environment to help deliver state-of-the art services. Many departments, such as the surgical department’s moving of patients’ paper clinical records to new digital medical records; and the Cancer Care Centre’s use of high-resolution images in treatment plans, have resulted in a much larger data footprint.
“We reassessed the hospital’s storage requirements and considered our future needs. We concluded we needed to migrate to a faster and more efficient storage cluster, and we selected Pure Storage’s FlashArray//X™ to accelerate our core applications. Moving to Pure Storage FlashArray//X has provided us with greater capacity and performance with lower risk. We worry less about security risk and cyber threats knowing we have a secure platform that is optimised and up to date.”
Fenton Kitchen
Chief Digital Officer, St George’s Hospital
Fenton said the Pure Storage solution has helped the hospital deliver superior patient care through fast and reliable system access, maintains high resiliency to keep systems running during any possible natural disasters, and provides the storage scalability needed to support other digital transformation initiatives.
Since deployment, the Pure Storage environment has enabled St George’s to expand its storage as needed to keep up with rapidly growing demand, accelerate the speed of file access and SQL instances and provide its IT staff with peace of mind with proactive monitoring to prevent issues. The migration to Pure Storage also provided reassurance for business continuity in the face of COVID-19.
“We wanted to get the new Pure Storage system implemented quickly as our storage needed to be ready to take on extra workload during the height of the pandemic,” he said. The St George’s IT team were able to deploy quickly with remote support from the Pure Storage team. “Once the hardware was delivered onsite at St George’s, the Pure arrays were up in under six hours,” he added.
The deployment of Pure Storage FlashArray//X, supported by real-time monitoring and updates from the Pure1® cloud-based management platform, resulted in a potential data reduction ratio of 3:1.
The hospital also selected the Pure Storage Evergreen™ storage model to enable IT staff to rapidly expand storage as needed. Since moving onto Pure, the team has not only increased storage capacity, but also gained significant speed and smoother integration with the VMware environment. This has resulted in faster file access to SQL instances helping to improve the stability of SQL connections for applications. Backups and snapshots are significantly faster as well.
The St George’s team implemented ActiveCluster™ and advanced data protection measures that help maintain availability and deliver high resiliency should an unforeseen event occur. In addition, IT staff now receive pre-emptive alerts with Pure1.
“Healthcare organisations like St George’s faced more challenges than most other sectors during the pandemic. They not only had to meet the influx of patients but also had to ensure they were operating at a functional level. Undertaking a digital transformation project during the pandemic was extremely brave of the St George’s IT team and Pure Storage was proud to be able to help them pull it off smoothly with our uncomplicated but powerful modern data solutions,” said Stuart Blythe, Country Manager, New Zealand, Pure Storage.
About Pure Storage
Pure Storage (NYSE: PSTG) uncomplicates data storage, forever. Pure delivers a cloud experience that empowers every organization to get the most from their data while reducing the complexity and expense of managing the infrastructure behind it. Pure’s commitment to providing true storage as-a-service gives customers the agility to meet changing data needs at speed and scale, whether they are deploying traditional workloads, modern applications, containers, or more. And with a certified customer satisfaction score in the top one percent of B2B companies, Pure's ever-expanding list of customers are among the happiest in the world. For more information, visit www.purestorage.com.
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