Since installing Pure FlashArrays to support its Epic environment, AHS has achieved 100% availability. Epic sets a threshold for acceptable storage bandwidth of 1,500Mbs for reads and 300Mbs for writes. In pre-production testing of Pure arrays on a subset of hospital operations, performance results reached 3,000Mbs (reads) and 600Mbs (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 two-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 on Pure, 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, Vice President of Global Healthcare Technology Strategy at 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 latest technology without forklift upgrades and with full preservation of investment in Pure solutions. AHS estimates that the total cost ownership with Pure will result in savings of more than $1.3 million over six years.
