French Centre Hospitalier de Douai Relies on Pillar

The Centre Hospitalier de Douai had one major goal with replacing its storage system: supporting continuous, 24/7 hospital operations to tend to more than 37,000 patients a year. By replacing its IBM storage system with the Pillar Axiom from  Pillar Data Systems, the hospital doubled its application performance, increased its utilization (useable capacity) to 92% and achieved 99.999% availability, effectively creating the backbone of its business continuity solution.

 
“We killed three birds with one stone,” said Philippe Huddlestone, CTO, Centre Hospitalier de Douai. “For a hospital, medical applications are the core of our business. Doctors use the applications to make the right decisions for the best care of their patients. And continuous availability is also crucial because the hospital staff is making these life-influencing decisions in real-time.”
 
Medical professionals deal with matters of life every day, giving ‘mission-critical’ a whole new meaning. Huddlestone and his staff audited the previous system to determine how they could improve the response time of these mission-critical applications, such as patient registration, bed-side mobile access and radiology imaging, each one having different performance criteria.
 
The hospital also needed an infrastructure in place to support its project to digitize medical records. The goal of this project was to make information readily available wherever and whenever it was needed. The information included archival and current patient data and image files from radiology – available for each patient from a single file.
 
“If you have a storage system that treats all data and applications equally, it’s impossible to achieve the results that Centre Hospitalier de Douai did – let alone in this short period of time,” said Bob Maness, Vice President, Worldwide Marketing and Channel Sales, Pillar Data Systems. “Typically, utilization rates are in the 30-40% range because with other systems, as capacity is added performance declines. It does not help customers to be able to input more patient files if accessing them takes that much longer. The silver bullet is the Application-Aware Pillar Axiom because it makes the most efficient use of available capacity.”  
 
While Pillar Data Systems guarantees a utilization rate of 80% or more, Huddlestone and his IT team have achieved rates of around 92% without any performance compromises. This is largely due to Pillar’s Quality of Service within its Application-Aware feature that allocates storage resources to different tiers of data based on business priority.
 
The Pillar Axiom’s non-disruptive upgrade feature contributes to its ability to remain continuously online, allowing administrators to easily add more capacity without taking the system down. Because it is easy to change the provisioning settings or to increase capacity without having to change the basic system, the IT staff has freed up much needed time and resources, contributing to the reduction in overall total cost of ownership.
 
“Now we have a system that anyone on the IT staff can manage, giving them more flexibility and autonomy to work on more pressing hospital projects,” added Huddlestone.
 
The Centre Hospitalier de Douai is located in the commune of Douai in northern France and employs about 1,800 people, including 300 doctors. In addition to general patient admissions, this 800-bed hospital also has a pharmacy and an urgent care center distributed across two major sites and 17 remote sites. In 2008, the Centre Hospitalier took care of 37,200 patients, the doctors saw 71,000 patients and there were 1,400 births in the maternity ward. All of this is taken care of by an IT staff of 13 people who maintain the IT infrastructure.