Toronto-based hospital moves Cerner EHR applications
onto all-flash arrays from Pure Storage

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — August 2, 2017 — Pure Storage (NYSE: PSTG), the market's leading independent all-flash data platform vendor for the cloud era, today announced that North York General Hospital (NYGH), one of Canada’s leading medical facilities, has deployed Pure Storage to host all of its mission-critical applications and patient data. The hospital hosts its Cerner electronic health record (EHR) applications on Pure Storage all-flash arrays.

Pure Storage provides the resiliency, security and high performance that improves clinician productivity and increases the time devoted to patient care, while maximizing the long-term impact of the hospital’s investment in IT infrastructure.

“We wanted a data platform that would give our clinicians, back-office staff and other end-users exceptional response time when accessing critical applications and data.  The same solution also had to provide – at no additional cost - essential features like data compression, de-duplication and snapshots,” said Sumon Acharjee, Chief Information Officer, North York General Hospital. “After looking at all-flash offerings from several vendors, the comprehensive feature set, price point and cost-benefit of Pure Storage proved to deliver significant competitive advantages.”

As part of Canada’s government-run healthcare system, NYGH refreshes its IT infrastructure only once every seven years due to highly controlled funding. That made the Evergreen™ Storage program from Pure especially attractive. The Evergreen program enables storage that is deployed once and upgraded as needed, for a decade or more.  Components can be mixed and matched – all online and without performance disruption – to keep storage dense, efficient and modern.

“Evergreen is a great business model. When you have a seven-year refresh cycle, it’s very valuable to know your maintenance costs for the life of the product,” said Acharjee. “Cerner is deployed in every in-patient area of the hospital. It is a mission-critical system that needs to have maximum performance, resiliency and uptime. Pure Storage delivers on all three of those requirements, while saving us money now and long into the future.”

To underscore the cost-effectiveness of its all-flash storage solution, eliminating just two years of the maintenance fees for NYGH’s legacy spinning-disk storage system paid for the acquisition of the Pure system.

The impact of improved storage performance is felt across multiple areas of the hospital. Most important is the effect on physicians and other clinicians, who now spend less time waiting for files, reports and other critical data, thanks to 10-20% improvements in IO performance and consistent sub-millisecond latencies. Business operations see positive outcomes, as well. “One of the biggest benefits we’ve seen from the Pure system is the ability to generate reports more efficiently,” Acharjee noted. “Our business intelligence decision-support team does a lot of slicing and dicing of this data, and the improved processing we now enjoy allows them to generate a lot more business insight in a short amount of time.” Installing the Pure arrays also results in lower operating costs, Acharjee added, “because we can go to our co-lo facility when we renegotiate our contract and show them how little the footprint and energy costs of the Pure array will be.”

“As a HIMSS Stage 6 healthcare organization, North York General Hospital is a recognized leader in applying advanced technology for the improvement of patient care,” said Vik Nagjee, VP and CTO of Healthcare and Life Sciences, Pure Storage. “NYGH’s decision to migrate their entire Cerner environment to our all-flash storage solution marks another milestone for Pure in the healthcare industry. More importantly, we recognize that everyone benefits when clinicians see improvements in the patient-care environment and hospital administrators see long-term savings in costs.”

About North York General Hospital

North York General Hospital, affiliated with the University of Toronto, is one of Canada's leading community academic hospitals. We offer our culturally diverse community a wide range of acute care, ambulatory and long-term care services across three sites. Through partnerships, collaboration and academic endeavours, we seek to set new standards for patient- and family-centred care. Working together with our patients and their families, we are making a world of difference.

About Pure Storage

Pure Storage (NYSE:PSTG) helps companies push the boundaries of what’s possible. Pure's end-to-end data platform - including FlashArray, FlashBlade and our converged offering with Cisco, FlashStack – is powered by innovative software that’s cloud-connected for management from anywhere on a mobile device and supported by the Evergreen business model. The company’s all-flash based technology, combined with its customer-friendly business model, drives business and IT transformation with solutions that are effortless, efficient and evergreen. With Pure's industry leading Satmetrix-certified NPS score of 83.7, Pure customers are some of the happiest in the world, and include organizations of all sizes, across an ever-expanding range of industries.

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