Salinas Valley Memorial Healthcare System Implementing Pure Storage AFA

Facing a storage foundation that could not support vital legacy applications as well as the rollout of a next-generation electronic health record (EHR) and picture archiving and communication system (PACS), Salinas Valley Memorial Healthcare System (SVMHS) deployed an all-flash solution from Pure Storage, Inc., to power these and other mission-critical healthcare applications.

Working with Pure, SVMHS has improved its practice management system response time and is able to refresh rounding reports four times faster – boosting team productivity and supporting the system’s commitment to patient centricity. The solution also has simplified IT management and reduced TCO.

Improving Care and Efficiency
while Building a Patient-centric, Data-driven Future
SVMHS, a 263-bed hospital and an affiliated clinic that serves over 3,000 families in agriculturally rich central California, aims to be a hospital system with integrated data and a single record for every patient. The goal is to improve the ability of clinicians to make informed, and clinically relevant decisions that support high quality care and improved outcomes. Pure’s solution provides the groundwork for this mission and paves the way for a patient-centric, data-driven future.

SVHMS’ legacy storage system was nearing end of life, and was facing a forklift upgrade. Sluggish storage caused unacceptable delays in practice-management applications, the IT team was experiencing more disk failures, and SVMHS’s new EHR system required a fast, flexible storage infrastructure.

Since deploying Pure, the hospital creates rounding reports more than four times faster – in 20 to 45s vs. 2 to 4mn. This performance improvement provides clinicians with critical information faster and creates efficiencies that translate to approximately 20 person-days saved annually.

SVMHS also can refresh its digital status boards in emergency rooms and other high-impact sections of the hospital more rapidly.

The performance allows the hospital to populate the boards with a richer set of data to keep both staff and visitors better informed and support real-time clinical decisions.

After migration of SVMHS’s Meditech environment onto the Pure array, the organization’s programmer and developer reported no end-user complaints since moving its data repository reporting functions to Pure, and the performance improvement has made its Meditech data repository substantially more user-friendly and accessible.

Given these process improvements, the installation of Pure has simplified the lives of SVMHS’s IT staff.

“We replaced two entire SANs with a single Pure array, and we are very happy with it,” said Audrey Parks, CIO, SVMHS. “It’s definitely to our advantage to be able to converge workloads on a single array. It’s much more cost-effective and considerably easier to manage – just one large pool of storage that operates as a centralized data store.“

The choice of also contributed to an improved environment for backup and DR. With Pure’s ActiveCluster synchronous replication feature in Purity software, SVMHS will experience quicker restores and the ability to preserve a large enough number of copies so that if an outage takes place, restore is possible at a point very close to when the outage occurred.

Selection Factors
In choosing a storage vendor, SVMHS considered its size, staffing, tolerance for risk, pricing, and other non-technical factors. With features that may cost extra or not exist with other providers – such as compression, deduplication, snapshots, and cloning – Pure provided an all-in-one platform. SVHMS’ IT team was impressed by Pure’s simplified storage model, which would free staff for higher-priority strategic initiatives, and encryption at rest strengthens information security and protection of patient data.

SVMHS also saw long-term value in Pure’s Evergreen Storage program, which provides customers access to the latest technology and features without forklift upgrades and protection of existing investment.

“The Evergreen program is so innovative and compelling that our technical and finance teams saw tremendous value from it,” Parks noted. “We tried to make an apples-to-apples comparison with what the other three vendors proposed, but none of them had anything even close.“