Wheeling Hospital improves IT efficiency, flexibility and affordability

Wheeling Hospital, a community hospital in Wheeling, West Virginia, is boosting system performance and supporting new initiatives with new data center technology based on Dell solutions. By migrating from EMC to Dell storage, servers and networking, the hospital’s IT staff is able to spend less time on data center administration and instead focus on implementing critical new technology initiatives to improve healthcare delivery.

With 276 beds, Wheeling Hospital has supported the Northern Panhandle of West Virginia, Eastern Ohio and parts of Pennsylvania since 1850. To continue to effectively serve the region, the hospital needed to update its outdated IT infrastructure, including an aging EMC storage area network (SAN) array, and improve overnight database backups that were taking up to ten hours to complete. Wheeling Hospital turned to Dell to improve data center performance and manageability.

Wheeling Hospital reviewed multiple solutions and decided to deploy a Dell Compellent SAN for the first time. The hospital was intrigued by the ability to deploy a hybrid flash Dell Compellent solution, including both write-intensive and read-intensive flash drives as well as spinning-disk capabilities. Wheeling Hospital deployed two Dell Compellent SC8000 flash-optimised arrays, each with 60TB of storage.

“As a community hospital focused on targeted patient care, our budget resources did not support implementing an all-flash storage solution,” said Brent Estep, Senior Systems Engineer at Wheeling Hospital. “The Dell Compellent array and Dell services truly exceeded our high expectations. With two separate tiers of flash and another bottom tier of spinning disk, we are able to optimise our storage costs and meet the needs of both our clinical information system and our less critical systems in one array. The Compellent solution provides automated intelligent data placement across multiple tiers and is definitely a huge advantage.”

The hospital also deployed ten PowerEdge R720 rack servers, as well as two PowerEdge R910s for its database platform. Additionally, Wheeling Hospital upgraded its networking environment from 1-Gigabit switches to four Dell Networking 8132 switches, which provide 10-Gigabit Ethernet capabilities.

“As with any hospital, our top priorities are patient safety and patient outcomes,” said Sean Loy, Director of Clinical Informatics at Wheeling Hospital. “It’s our job in IT to come up with cost-effective, cutting-edge services to achieve these goals, and we’ve had great success with help from our Dell solution. Dell delivered on all of its promises to us, and we’ve been very happy with the whole process from deployment to technology performance and reliability to support. Dell definitely has exceeded our expectations.”

Wheeling Hospital dramatically improved the performance of its clinical information system once it implemented the new storage, server and networking technologies. The hospital cut backup time in half and achieved a 40 percent increase in database performance with the Dell Compellent flash-optimised array and Dell Networking switches. Moreover, the hospital was able to easily upgrade to the latest version of their clinical information system because of the additional capacity and performance it is receiving from the Dell solution.

“Wheeling Hospital was able to save a third of the budget it would have spent on a competitive solution by implementing Dell Storage. This is a testament to our efforts to redefine the economics of enterprise storage for customers,” said Alan Atkinson, vice president and general manager, Dell Storage. “As organisations of all sizes continue to look for ways to make the most of their IT budgets, Dell offers the industry’s most cost-optimised, enterprise storage solutions and a holistic understanding of data center needs with our end-to-end portfolio and capabilities. The Dell solution enables Wheeling Hospital to reap the benefits of information-driven healthcare by freeing up resources to invest in new technologies that improve patient care.”

Additionally, Wheeling Hospital took advantage of Dell Deployment Services to deploy the new technology, keeping implementation on time to meet a strict deadline, as well as Dell Compellent Copilot support, allowing IT administrators to focus on other technology initiatives.