Shannon Medical Center Chooses Violin Memory

Violin Memory, Inc. announced that Shannon Medical Center, a regional hospital serving San Angelo, TX, has chosen its solutions to help improve the performance of the medical center’s key healthcare applications, enabling hospital staff to respond faster and more efficiently to the medical center’s growing patient base.

Deploying its McKesson healthcare applications on a Violin 6000 Series Flash Memory Array, Shannon Medical Center experienced a 20x acceleration of application response times. The medical center was also able to scale its virtual desktop environment from 100 to 2,300 seats and drive consolidation in its data center to reduce costs.

“Our community is growing, and we needed to accommodate an increase in patients and staff,” commented Mike Russell, assistant director of IT, Shannon Medical Center. “Violin’s flash memory array has allowed us to massively expand our virtual desktops and increase performance at the same time. It turned out to be less expensive and a better solution than adding more disks and hoping for the best.“

A number of different groups depend on the IT resources at Shannon Medical Center, including the hospital staff, who wanted to improve service levels and accommodate a growing number of patients. The center also wanted to scale its virtual desktop deployments as well as accelerate data access performance, which was proving to be a bottleneck. After deploying a Violin flash memory array, hospital staff realized a 3x improvement in virtual desktop boot times, improving responsiveness for staff and patients. Additionally, its SQL-based healthcare applications experienced run time reductions, from more than six hours using its previous disk-based storage to less than one hour using the solution.

The solution has provided a ROI beyond accelerating access to patient data for hospital staff. With faster, denser storage, Shannon Medical Center has reduced its operational expenditures including overall database licensing costs and compacted server room footprint through system consolidation. Additionally, the medical center was able to achieve critical milestones associated with ‘meaningful use’ regulations for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

“When someone is sick or injured, you want to get them treated as fast as possible,” said Narayan Venkat, VP of product management, Violin. “For a medical center, it is critical to deliver response times that provide fast turn-around and reduce overall exposure.“