Aspirus Opts for EMC Information Infrastructure

EMC Corporation announced that Aspirus, a non-profit system of hospitals, clinics and other healthcare facilities with more than 4,200 employees and more than 400 licensed inpatient beds in its system, is helping its practitioners streamline workflows while reducing IT administrative costs leveraging EMC solutions and services for data center consolidation and virtualization.

Glynn Hollis, Aspirus’ Director of Technical Services, said: "Our patient records have grown tremendously as we’ve acquired other hospitals and opened new clinics. As our infrastructure continues to grow to support this larger healthcare network, we’re always looking for IT solutions to ensure our application performance remains high."

Based in Wausau, Wis., Aspirus deployed a tiered information infrastructure to maximize the performance and efficiency of clinical and business information workflows required for optimum care delivery. Aspirus relies on an EMC CLARiiON CX4 networked storage system with enterprise flash drives delivering ultra-high performance and business continuity for its Epic electronic medical record (EMR) and clinical management applications, CLARiiON CX3 and EMC Celerra for its Sectra PACS radiology and cardiology imaging systems.

Aspirus archives its medical images using an EMC Centera content-addressed storage and will soon use EMC SourceOne to archive its Microsoft Exchange emails. Additionally, Aspirus replaced Symantec NetBackup with EMC NetWorker and EMC Avamar backup software to provide data deduplication and centralized, automated backup and recovery.

Tom Whalen, Aspirus’ IT Server and Storage Infrastructure Team Leader, said: "Deploying the industry-leading EMC CLARiiON with flash technology has helped us deliver fast performance and reduced our end-user read cycles from 12 to 15 milliseconds to 1 to 1.5 milliseconds. And, our clinical batch processing times have been reduced by 430 percent. As a result, our physicians, radiologists and administrative employees are able to rapidly retrieve clinical and patient information to provide a higher level of clinical service."

Aspirus has also actively consolidated its IT resources to increase efficiency and lower costs. This includes consolidating all of its applications, such as Sectra PACS, Epic, Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server databases and VMware virtual machines using the CLARiiON networked storage system. This consolidation provides Aspirus with the flexibility to meet its storage performance needs while reducing power and cooling costs and enabling a centralized and simpler management point.

Additionally, Aspirus has embraced the VMware infrastructure to consolidate its blade server technology and Citrix environments for its Epic EMR.

"We were buying more and more pizza-box servers to support our growing Epic Hyperspace environment and it was starting to tax our power, performance and overall administrative tasks," said Whalen. "We consolidated from many, many racks of 1U servers onto two enclosures of blade servers and a centralized resource of virtual machines. With VMware tools like vMotion and Storage vMotion, we can shift virtual machines around when we’re doing upgrades or migrations or provisioning storage without downtime."

Hollis added: "We’re now virtualizing across the board and have consolidated over 300 physical servers onto 64 blades as virtual machines. We’ve realized a 25-35 percent reduction in power and cooling usage, which is nice icing on the cake, but the truly big savings are in server administration and overhead. We’ve also slowed growth of our physical data center space."

EMC Global Services has worked extensively with Aspirus to provide assessment, design, implementation, and data migration services. EMC assessed their storage needs, gathered and evaluated performance metrics and designed a disk layout to meet Aspirus’ performance objectives today and in the future. The new environment consolidates a multi-CLARiiON configuration into one CLARiiON CX4 960. EMC Global Services continues to partner with Aspirus to support its ongoing information infrastructure goals.

Hollis said: "When EMC Global Services are on site, they are extended members of our team and work with us as partners. We are one of the first organizations to implement flash drives and virtualization in a production clinical healthcare environment. EMC played a big role in making these projects successful and deliver value."