Anchorage Neighborhood Health Center With PernixData FVP Software

PernixData, Inc. announced that Anchorage Neighborhood Health Center (ANHC), Alaska’s first and largest community health center, has deployed its FVP software to provide the needed storage performance boost without adding unnecessary capacity.

ANHC provides primary care medical, dental and behavioral health services to more than 13,000 individual patients per year. In 2012, ANHC consolidated its two data centers into the current facility in Midtown Anchorage. The move provided an initial influx of grant funding that enabled a total redesign of the IT infrastructure that included server virtualization and a storage upgrade to a SAN based on EMC VNXe 3300.

“Initially, everything was just fine, but once our environment was virtualized, it was easy to spin up new VMs. Pretty soon, we started hitting performance bottlenecks,” said Mike Lane, the systems administrator responsible, ANHC’s virtualized infrastructure.

ANHC’s doctors and nurses access patient records by using the Electronic Health Record (EHR) system based on Intergy, a graphically-intensive application frequently access throughout the day. With each screen refresh taking over fives to complete, insufficient performance on Intergy had a direct correlation with staff and patient satisfaction.

After experimenting with an expansion of the EMC array with additional disk shelf and still seeing too-high latency, Lane turned to FVP software.

FVP is an infrastructure element of any virtualized data center. The software virtualizes server side flash and memory into a clustered acceleration tier that enables IT administrators to optimize VM performance while scaling-out storage performance with compute resources.

By complementing EMC storage with FVP and 1TB Micron SSDs in the existing Dell PowerEdge R620 servers, ANHC gained performance improvement in the most non-disruptive and cost-effective manner possible. Within one day of deployment, ANHC’s EHR system began responding 3x faster, with latency dropping below the 2 ms mark ANHC was looking for.

Lane was also impressed by the software’s ease of use,

“The console is so easy to use – it’s almost idiot-proof,” he said.