Piedmont HealthCare Deploying Cohesity Web-Scale, Hyperconverged Secondary Storage Platform

Cohesity, Inc., in hyperconverged secondary storage, announced that Piedmont HealthCare, Inc. (PHC), a large physician-owned and directed multi-specialty group in North Carolina, deployed its platform to achieve tangible cost and time savings, and to manage data growth.

Piedmont Healthcare was able to simplify and streamline its system administration and file sharing processes and put itself in position to adapt to upcoming trends and requirements for secondary data management.

Piedmont Healthcare turned to Cohesity’s partner Software House International Corp., a provider of IT products and services, to identify a secondary data solution along with a replacement system for primary storage. Before implementing Cohesity, Piedmont was forced to dedicate extensive time and personnel to keep its previous data management solutions up and running properly, including an especially resource-intensive process for adding VMs. Failures were common and often required more than a week of troubleshooting and mandated tickets for resolution. The IT team lacked modern capabilities like auto-discovery and auto-protect and was running on an old version of Java because the current version was not supported under its previous architecture.

Piedmont chose Cohesity due to its lower operating costs, ease of use and interface, and additional capabilities such as built-in apps like Password Detector, allowing the company to eventually be able to scan files that are backed up for stored passwords. Cohesity provided additional capabilities that will allow the medical provider to work with end users to store and analyze private data securely.

The healthcare organization deployed Cohesity 2,500 hyperconverged node appliances for secure backup for over 100 VMs, up to five SQL backups, as well as one physical server. Piedmont used Pure Storage, Inc. for its mission-critical workloads, and deployed Cohesity at the same time to implement a modern infrastructure with integration between the two solution providers, ensuring simplified management and a smooth rollout.

“The usual indication of a successful product launch is if the implementation is considered a ‘non-event’. The introduction of the Cohesity solution at PHC was disruptive, in a very positive way, and the team is still jockeying for day-to-day ownership of backups, something I’ve never seen before,” said Byron Williams, IT infrastructure manager, Piedmont HealthCare.

Using Cohesity, Piedmont HealthCare has achieved several benefits: 

• Saved up to 40% on OpEx costs.
• Features like auto-discovery and auto-protect expanded ability to respond to end users.
• The company saw a 2-to-1 data reduction ratio with Cohesity, freeing up more than 60% of its storage cluster and seeing great capacity benefit with Cohesity data deduplication.
• Upgrades are possible without bringing down a machine, and without outside vendor assistance in less time and with no excess cost.
• A modern secondary storage solution enabled faster file recovery and significant time savings.

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