Willis-Knighton Health System Selects EMC Symmetrix VMAX

EMC Corporation announced that
Willis-Knighton Health System, a Shreveport, LA-based healthcare provider
comprising four hospital campuses, has deployed EMC Symmetrix VMAX storage
systems to ensure more than five-9’s availability for its rapidly growing
electronic medical record (EMR) applications, which include virtualized
MEDITECH healthcare information system, Siemens Soarian healthcare process
management, and Sectra PACS imaging as well as other mission-critical
applications such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases, and Microsoft
Exchange email. Willis-Knighton considered IBM Corp. and Dell Compellent storage
solutions, but chose Symmetrix VMAX for its performance and availability
capabilities.

Customer
Benefits

• Increased Performance: Willis-Knighton
  has increased performance of its healthcare applications by 35% with VMAX.
• Maximized Availability: Its VMAX
  system’s redundant, high-availability architecture is providing Willis-Knighton
  with more than five-9’s availability, allowing staff to access EMRs in less
  than a second.
• Increased Capacity: Willis-Knighton’s
  IT environment has increased capacity by 70% using EMC VMAX with the ability to
  scale to handle increased data growth.
• Return on Investment Achieved:Willis-Knighton’s IT department is able to
  spend less time managing storage and more time on new projects to enhance
  services to patients thanks to EMC’s intuitive management tools and tight
  integration between VMAX and vSphere.

Willis-Knighton’s
IT infrastructure was expanding rapidly due to advances in imaging technology
and its ability to service more patients. With PACS images increasing by more
than 30 terabytes over the past two years, Willis-Knighton realized it needed
to update its IT infrastructure with storage technology that
would scale as the healthcare provider’s needs increased, while also
maintaining performance levels.

Willis-Knighton
is also using EMC TimeFinder local replication software and EMC NetWorker
unified backup and recovery solution for backing up its mission-critical
healthcare management and operations applications to an EMC Data Domain
deduplication storage system. In addition, Willis-Knighton is implementing EMC
SRDF/A for replication of data from the VMAX in its production data center to a
second VMAX in its disaster recovery site.

Charles
Laster, Willis-Knighton’s Chief Information Officer commented: "The precision of a CT scan is now up-to 128
slices, which represents a significant increase in data that we need to store,
protect and manage compared to a year ago. We have to ensure that vital medical
information like this can be retrieved by our health practitioners any time of
day or night. The quality of patient care depends on such access."

"I’ve been very impressed with EMC’s maniacal
focus on customer service. We’ve worked with a lot of vendors and the top-notch
service and support we get from EMC are strong differentiators. VMAX gives us a
very versatile platform on which to build. We strive to have the latest and
greatest technology to become more competitive and deliver new, more advanced
services to our patients. And with VMAX, when a physician or nurse goes into
our EMRs to get test results or view an image, we’re confident that the
information will be on their screen in an instant."

Jonathan Lee
, Network Administrator Supervisor at Willis-Knighton commented: "The power and scalability of the VMAX and
its tight integration with VMware vSphere are central to our virtualization
plans. We’ve already virtualized our MEDITECH system and expect to have 40% of
our infrastructure virtualized within the next 12 to 18 months. With VMAX’s
built-in management features and EMC’s Ionix ControlCenter software, we have
excellent visibility into our performance status and storage growth. Because we
spend less time managing storage, we have a smaller IT department today than
five years ago even though our environment has grown exponentially. As a
result, we have more time to take on new projects that enhance the quality of
our healthcare."