Toronto, Canada-Based North York General Hospital Hosts Patient Data on Pure Storage All-Flash Arrays

Pure Storage, Inc. announced that North York General Hospital (NYGH), Canadian medical facilities, has deployed Pure Storage to host all of its mission-critical applications and patient data.

The hospital hosts its Cerner electronic health record (EHR) applications on Pure Storage all-flash arrays.

Pure Storage provides the resiliency, security and performance that improves clinician productivity and increases the time devoted to patient care, while maximizing the long-term impact of the hospital’s investment in IT infrastructure.

“We wanted a data platform that would give our clinicians, back-office staff and other end-users exceptional response time when accessing critical applications and data. The same solution also had to provide at no additional cost – essential features like data compression, de-duplication and snapshots,” said Sumon Acharjee, CIO, North York General Hospital. “After looking at all-flash offerings from several vendors, the comprehensive feature set, price point and cost-benefit of Pure Storage proved to deliver significant competitive advantages.“

As part of Canada’s government-run healthcare system, NYGH refreshes its IT infrastructure only once every seven years due to highly controlled funding. That made the Evergreen Storage program from Pure attractive. The program enables storage that is deployed once and upgraded as needed, for a decade or more. Components can be mixed and matched all online and without performance disruption to keep storage dense, efficient and modern.

“Evergreen is a great business model. When you have a seven-year refresh cycle, it’s very valuable to know your maintenance costs for the life of the product,” said Acharjee. “Cerner is deployed in every in-patient area of the hospital. It is a mission-critical system that needs to have maximum performance, resiliency and uptime. Pure Storage delivers on all three of those requirements, while saving us money now and long into the future.“

To underscore the cost-effectiveness of its all-flash storage solution, eliminating just two years of the maintenance fees for NYGH’s legacy spinning-disk storage system paid for the acquisition of the Pure system.

The impact of improved storage performance is felt across multiple areas of the hospital. Important is the effect on physicians and other clinicians, who spend less time waiting for files, reports and other critical data, thanks to 10-20% improvements in IO performance and consistent sub-millisecond latencies. Business operations also see positive outcomes.

“One of the biggest benefits we’ve seen from the Pure system is the ability to generate reports more efficiently,” Acharjee noted. “Our business intelligence decision-support team does a lot of slicing and dicing of this data, and the improved processing we now enjoy allows them to generate a lot more business insight in a short amount of time. Installing the Pure arrays also results in lower operating costs, because we can go to our co-lo facility when we renegotiate our contract and show them how little the footprint and energy costs of the Pure array will be.“

“As a HIMSS Stage 6 healthcare organization, North York General Hospital is a recognized leader in applying advanced technology for the improvement of patient care,” said Vik Nagjee, VP and CTO of healthcare and life sciences, Pure. “NYGH’s decision to migrate their entire Cerner environment to our all-flash storage solution marks another milestone for Pure in the healthcare industry. More importantly, we recognize that everyone benefits when clinicians see improvements in the patient-care environment and hospital administrators see long-term savings in costs.“