Ramsay Health Care UK Chose Violin Flash Storage

Violin Memory, Inc. was chosen by Ramsay Health Care UK to replace its hard-disk-based infrastructure with all-flash storage to improve application performance and eliminate downtime.

A private healthcare provider in the UK with 30 hospitals and two specialist neurological units, Ramsay Health Care UK is a subsidiary of Ramsay Group, which operates in Australia (HQ), France (Santé) and Indonesia, with over 25,000 worldwide employees and 100+ hospitals.

Ramsay’s business application – Cambio COSMIC – is a PAS (Patient Administration System) database running on SQL, which supports all patient records, care information and appointments, and underpins the booking services provided to patients and clients. Slow application performance and unplanned downtime on Ramsay’s primary data platform have tangible and critical implications on business and patient care, as well as customer satisfaction. Its existing hard-disk drive environment was proving to be a bottleneck and constraints on data centre space was a limiting factor in investing further in the disk platform to address performance and latency issues. Since deploying the Violin all-flash arrays, Ramsay has had uninterrupted service from the flash platform, while failure rates in its disk platform have continued to occur with increasing regularity.

“Stability was a key issue in our disk and virtualisation platform, further impacting IT’s ability to deploy crucial updates to our key application – Cambio COSMIC – as well as the infrastructure supporting it. These issues were exacerbated under peak operating times” said Geoff Cross, CIO, Ramsay Health Care UK. “With the Violin platform, we achieved stability and improved performance in all three business applications that were migrated, making crucial firmware updates a seamless viability. We no longer have to invest in legacy disk storage and can actually repurpose the disk drives for backup.“

Other benefits include:

• Improvement in application performance for Ramsay’s Cambio COSMIC SQL database, along with their JD Edwards Oracle database and their SQL data warehouse, to the dedicated Violin all-flash storage tier available in their virtual storage pool.
• Ramsay can explore changes at the application level to leverage the Violin flash platform and resolve outstanding inefficiencies in their server core usage.
• Nightly reports that ran reporting functions against all three applications to generate billing, scheduling, performance and invoicing reports for their 30 UK hospitals and clinics complete before the morning shift, allowing employees to work against the most recent data.
  

“This is what business transformation is all about,” said Amy Love, CMO, Violin. “A single platform that has a myriad of benefits beyond just capex and opex. With the Violin platform, Ramsay Health Care can transform and fine tune how it runs its business to drive efficiency as well as customer satisfaction.“