San Gorgonio Memorial Hospital uses DataCore

San Gorgonio Memorial Hospital has achieved a completely software-centric data center and is reaping the benefits of having virtualized its critical healthcare and database applications, using DataCore to help them overcome their primary performance and business continuity concerns. The hospital is now able to deliver faster application response times and non-stop business operations to serve the needs of more than 500 physicians, nurses and healthcare professionals who rely upon the system's availability to fulfill San Gorgonio's mission to provide safe, high quality, personalized healthcare services.

"I cannot stress how absolutely paramount uptime and speed are in healthcare," stated Richard Trower, senior programmer and database administrator at San Gorgonio. "When systems go down, our ability to deliver services to our patients is affected, which is unacceptable."
Trower explains that in moving to a software-defined data center environment, he gained greater freedom of choice and flexibility in how he can cost-effectively buy and deploy future hardware investments. "SANsymphony-V is the backbone of our storage infrastructure," continues Trower. "Virtualization has allowed us to increase efficiencies, performance and availability, which not only makes our faculty happy, but also our business office. This freedom of choice allows us to make wiser purchasing decisions and truly gain the maximum ROI from our hardware investments."

“As technology continues to become a critical part of how hospitals provide superior care for patients, reliability and the peace of mind that operations will not be interrupted will only increase in importance,” said Trower. “Deploying a brand new SAN architecture ended up costing the same as one year of SAN maintenance would have cost had we upgraded our hardware-based SAN from our previous provider. DataCore’s software-centric approach has delivered a virtualized storage platform that will save the hospital $85,000 in tangible maintenance costs – all pure cost-savings – alone over the next four years.”

Serving the San Bernardino Area of Banning and Beaumont California, San Gorgonio Memorial Hospital recently expanded its operations into a new facility, transitioning from a 77-bed community medical center to a 500-bed hospital including a new intensive care unit and emergency room. The hospital also deployed McKesson Corporation’s fully integrated clinical and financial hospital information system (HIS), Paragon. In order to support the move as well as future growth, IT administrators sought a way to overcome rising costs of maintenance and support for existing SANs. The hospital embraced the DataCore SANsymphony™-V storage virtualization platform along with VMware for server virtualization in order to avoid paying unreasonable annual maintenance fees on hardware as well as to boost performance and consolidation.

By virtualizing their infrastructure, San Gorgonio was able to reduce the rack space needed for the deployment by more than half. The cost of replacing the existing storage area network with a software-based solution was comparable to existing hardware maintenance costs, while delivering twice the performance and capacity previously available. SANsymphony-V’s hardware-agnostic capabilities also provide the hospital with greater flexibility and choice when purchasing additional server hardware. The virtualized storage platform now supports 46 virtual machines and manages 16 TBs of mirrored data, while providing 500 percent better throughput on the hospital’s SQL servers, five-nines availability, twice the usable capacity, four times the performance on existing SANs and up to 30 times faster speeds for various storage-intensive processes. According to Trower, “with DataCore in place, tasks like defragmentation of indexes, which previously took an hour and a half, can now be completed in about three minutes.”

Healthcare IT demands flexibility, performance and highly cost effective solutions
“As more and more industries embrace the benefits of software-defined storage, it is only natural that healthcare providers like San Gorgonio Memorial Hospital will continue to adopt virtualization platforms like SANsymphony-V,” said Paul Murphy, vice president of worldwide marketing at DataCore Software. “With technology playing such an important role in how hospitals provide patient care and maintain electronic health records and billing information, it is important that their IT infrastructure is not only efficient, but cost-effective enough to ensure that budgets are being used in a way that best benefits the patient.”