UK Healthcare at Home Limited Chooses Coraid

Coraid Inc. has been
selected by Healthcare at Home Limited, a UK
provider of home healthcare services, to improve its storage infrastructure.

The healthcare services provider has now deployed Coraid VSX storage
virtualization appliances coupled with Coraid EtherFlash SSD arrays to
create a performance, cost-effective, resilient solution that eliminates single points of failure in their Microsoft Dynamics environment.

EtherFlash is a storage solution that combines the functionality of
flash drives with the parallel scale out architecture of EtherDrive to
give price/performance for I/O intensive applications.

With around 1,000 employees caring for more than 150,000 patients a
year, Healthcare at Home Limited (HaH) is the UK’s largest provider of home
healthcare services. The company’s team works with the NHS, pharmaceutical
organisations, private medical insurers, consultants, GPs and charities from
locations throughout the UK to offer a nationalised service from a local base.

Healthcare at Home’s rapid growth regularly
presents interesting IT challenges. The company upgraded to a Microsoft
Dynamics CRM system for a more scalable and flexible solution suited to its
expanding business. This new system achieved innovations and efficiencies
but a combination of factors, such as a subsequent increase in the number of
users and systems connecting to the Dynamics CRM system also meant that a
more effective data storage solution had to be sourced.

The team, lead by IT infrastructure manager Luke Johnson, started
looking for a fast, resilient, cost effective storage system. After watching
Coraid’s two minute set-up video and holding an initial meeting with the
vendor, it decided to purchase a small unit to assess in its
development environment; this trial proved to be successful, with Coraid’s
array delivering performance. As a result Johnson’s team went ahead
with the purchase of a Coraid VSX featuring SSDs for additional performance.

"On both occasions Coraid
delivered exactly what we wanted and performed above our expectations. We knew
at that point that using a Coraid system to support our SQL cluster
underpinning Microsoft Dynamics was a no-brainer," said Luke Johnson,
IT infrastructure manager at Healthcare at Home.

Peter Godden, senior director for EMEA, added: "Coraid’s EtherDrive technology opens up a
new world of storage possibilities with the scalability and agility required by
current and future virtual and cloud environments, and it does so without
compromising on reliability or accruing the hefty costs associated with older
legacy storage systems."