Alacritech Accelerators Adopted by University of Pittsburgh Medical Center

Alacritech Inc. announced that the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) has adopted a networked storage strategy and incorporated Alacritech Scalable Network Accelerators (SNAs) to assist in the efficient management and backup of its large and growing pool of data. The increased efficiency of its systems allows end users—doctors, nurses, pharmacists and administrative staff—to quickly access patient information whenever and wherever they need it.

With more than 48,000 employees and serving upwards of 4 million people each year, the medical center is the leading health care system in western Pennsylvania and one of the largest integrated, non-profit healthcare systems in the United States. Known for its clinical innovation and outstanding patient care, UPMC invests millions of dollars annually to ensure quality care for its growing patient population. With the large amount of critical medical data, and privacy concerns regarding Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations, UPMC’s IT staff implemented a networked storage strategy that would significantly improve its management and backup process.

“The speed in which we’re able to deliver or recover critical information is truly a life and death matter,” said Kevin Muha, UPMC’s Enterprise Architect for the IT Service Transformation Project. “Alacritech’s scalable network accelerators (SNAs) enable us to meet the growth challenges we’ve seen over the past three years while dramatically improving the efficiency of our backup strategy. Over the last three years we have gone from backing up 5 to 105TB of data and on the restore front, a 200 gigabit Exchange mailbox can now be fully recovered in less than three hours without affecting user availability and performance. Furthermore, our servers are performing much better, increasing the productivity of end users and ultimately improving the quality care they provide patients”, Mahu concluded.

With server performance a major contributor to the inefficient backup process and poor data availability, UPMC deployed Alacritech SNAs in all its existing 440 HP and IBM Intel-based servers systems as well as the new IBM servers that provide data access to nearly 50 TB of file and SQL data. The data is primarily patient information but also incorporates data from accounting, HR and other support teams. By taking the TCP burden off the processor, the Alacritech SNAs allow each server to focus exclusively on its primary function—whether it is application processing, data serving or backup—resulting in enhanced server performance, improved data availability and a more efficient networked backup process.

While patient care is foremost, the IT department continues to see additional efficiency benefits from Alacritech’s SNAs. As UPMC continues the migration to IBM Y series systems from HP servers, they simply pop out the Alacritech SNAs and plug them in the new IBM systems. The ability to plug-and-play has made the migration much easier to manage and has ensured that the transition does not affect end user performance. When the rollover lease expires on the IBM servers, UPMC plans to simply reuse the Alacritech SNAs in the new systems, furthering the value UPMC realizes on its initial investment.

“We completely re-engineered our infrastructure and Alacritech just rolls right along with our plans,” Muha said. “As we continue to migrate to IBM and deploy more systems, we’ll continue to enjoy the performance benefits of Alacritech’s products.”