Professional Healthcare Resources Optimizes Applications

Astute
Networks, Inc. announced that Professional Healthcare Resources, Inc. (PHR)
has deployed its ViSX storage appliance to optimize the performance
of its healthcare applications and MS SharePoint
environment.

PHR, based in Annandale, VA, is dedicated
to helping thousands of Maryland, Virginia, and DC patients improve the quality
of their lives. From skilled nursing to therapy to personal care and hospice,
PHR helps those recovering from recent hospitalization or illness, those facing
their final days, or those who just need some assistance with the activities of
daily life. Founded in 1994, PHR cares for over 2,000 patients per day.

Facing high data growth and increasing
application performance demands, PHR began searching for a new scalable, but
cost-effective storage solution to augment its existing hard disk based storage
systems. In 2012, PHR looked into a variety of alternatives and determined that
the hybrid arrays from a number of start-ups and the newer Dell EqualLogic
solutions were not cost-effective and didn’t have the balance they needed
between performance, cost and environmentals.

After taking advantage of the Astute 30-day
no risk ‘try and buy’ offer and talking with Astute customer
references, it was clear to PHR that  ViSX delivered the simple to
deploy, cost-effective storage I/O performance acceleration they needed.

"The
difference in performance between our existing storage array and the ViSX
appliance was like night and day," said Hussein Sh-Ibrahim, IT director
for PHR. "The ViSX deployment was
very easy and the entire solid state solution was surprisingly affordable.
Productivity and efficiency is up, and our employees can now quickly access
patient data like never before. Backups that used to take four to five hours,
now complete in less than an hour, enabling us to perform other backups that we
were not able to do before. If you want fast performance quickly, get ViSX."

Today, six IT professionals support the
entire PHR network of servers, networks, storage, clients, and applications.
The physical datacenter infrastructure is based on dozens of HP and Dell
servers, including VMs, communicating over an Ethernet/iSCSI network to a
shared ViSX Performance Storage Appliance. Healthcare applications,
primarily related to patient care, are built around Sybase databases. For
employee collaboration, PHR relies on a SharePoint environment which
contains critical operational information supporting company productivity.

By adding a purpose-built ViSX Performance
Storage Appliance to its physical and virtualized environments, PHR now has
access to performance-optimized datastores that rely exclusively on solid state
flash technology.

As a result, PHR has:

• Improved database application performance
• Increased sustained random IOPS performance for VMs and virtual desktops
• Delivered ‘fantastic’ SharePoint response times
• Improved backup completion times by four to five times
• Lowered data center costs related to power, cooling, and floor space

Going forward, PHR plans to implement approximately 200 virtual desktops to improve
desktop support, enabling an easier to manage, more reliable infrastructure for
the end user devices – tablets and Windows PCs. The company is confident that
with the ViSX storage appliance in place, the storage infrastructure to
support a scalable VDI implementation is no longer a concern.

"PHR
is an excellent example of the typically rapid ROI our customers experience
with our ViSX performance storage appliances," said Len Rosenthal, SVP
marketing of Astute. "We continue to
hear time and again from our customers how Astute helps them overcome the
performance limitations they experience with traditional and hybrid storage
solutions, especially in virtual server and virtual desktop environments."