Elliot Health System Implements EMC and VMware

EMC Corporation announced that Elliot Health System (EHS), provider of healthcare services in Southern New Hampshire, has implemented EMC and VMware solutions to virtualize and consolidate its IT infrastructure for increased simplicity, efficiency, reliability and flexibility of patient care and administrative operations. As a result, EHS is moving forward on the deployment of a private cloud to deliver Electronic Medical Records (EMR) services to physician practices.

Brian Richards, Director of Technical Services, EHS, said: "To support overall growth and a range of new clinical applications, our storage infrastructure has doubled in size every 18 months. This rapid escalation was significantly impacting both the performance and reliability of our Epic EMR system. Through our fully integrated EMC and VMware infrastructure, replacing our HP EVA storage with an EMC Symmetrix system, we’re now able to go full throttle with our EMR initiatives and deliver peak applications, performance and availability."

"EMC’s private cloud technologies fit well into our strategy of making EMRs and other clinical applications even more pervasive and accessible to our clinicians and administrators," explained Richards. "In the end, it’s all about delivering more responsive and efficient patient care."

Using the VMware vSphere platform, EHS eliminated the need to purchase 130 physical servers through virtualizing 70 percent of its existing servers into 215 virtual machines, which are stored on its 80-terabyte EMC storage infrastructure. Among the benefits, the move has resulted in a fifty percent reduction in data center power usage. EHS plans to reach 90 percent virtualization within the next year.

Tom Fairfield, Manager, Technical Services, EHS, said: "Even though our infrastructure growth has been explosive, we’ve been able to keep the number of IT administrators to four. Everything is much easier – from allocating storage to spinning up new servers to troubleshooting."

EMC’s commitment to customer support and healthcare also are highly valued by Elliot, according to Fairfield. "We just love EMC. The support has been fantastic. EMC takes a real interest in our business and definitely steps up for us. It’s a partnership we wish we had with all our vendors."

"We like the resources of a market leader like EMC," adds Richards. "We went to an Epic user’s conference and learned a lot by talking to other Epic customers about their struggles and best practices. EMC also has technical people onsite at Epic working to improve how EMC and Epic solutions perform together."

Elliot is using its EMC Symmetrix storage area network (SAN) to store its Epic EMR, Epic Clarity reporting, McKesson financial management and Microsoft SQL Server applications. The healthcare provider’s ERP, Lawson, document management, Microsoft Exchange email, Sunquest laboratory management and VMware virtual machines are stored on an EMC CLARiiON CX4 system. EHS is implementing EMC Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) to move application data across EMC enterprise flash drives, fibre channel and SATA disk.

For data protection, Elliot replicates the Symmetrix and CLARiiON systems located in its primary and disaster recovery data centers. In addition, Elliot uses RSA SecurID authentication solution to protect remote access to confidential data across its IT infrastructure.