MedWest Health System Manages Rapid Growth of Clinical and Mission-Critical Applications with EMC VNX

LAS VEGAS, Feb. 21, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- HIMSS -- EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) today announced that MedWest Health System, a comprehensive health provider in Western North Carolina operating three hospital campuses and four outpatient facilities, replaced its Dell EqualLogic environment and has standardized its IT infrastructure on EMC® technologies, including EMC VNX™ unified storage with the EMC FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) Suite.  MedWest selected VNX to increase the simplicity efficiency and performance of its critical applications, such as McKesson Paragon hospital information system (HIS), Allscripts electronic health record (EHR) system, DR Systems PACS solution, Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server.  Additionally, the health provider is also leveraging EMC Avamar® for backup and recovery, EMC Unisphere™ for simplified management and EMC RecoverPoint for replication and recovery of mission-critical applications.

Customer Benefits:

• Increased Agility—MedWest can now set up application environments in just a couple of hours compared to weeks, enabling IT to more effectively support the healthcare provider's strategic goals.
• Improved Performance—EMC's VNX FAST Suite has enabled MedWest to significantly increase performance of its IT infrastructure.
• Data Backup Efficiency—Achieving a 98% deduplication rate with Avamar,  MedWest has reduced backup times by more than 85%, completing daily full backups in just three hours compared to a continuous 24x7 backup process with its previous tape solution while reducing weekly backup administration time from five hours to just 5-10 minutes.

Customer Challenges and Solution:

MedWest had seen its data assets increase significantly due to its acquisition of new physician practices and implementing new clinical and business applications to support the U.S. federal government's increasing 'meaningful use' reporting requirements for Electronic Medical Records (EMRs).  

Replacing 100 terabytes of Dell EqualLogic, MedWest has standardized on EMC technologies to improve simplicity, efficiency and performance of its IT infrastructure.  MedWest also uses EMC Unisphere™ management software to simply manage its EMC unified storage and EMC RecoverPoint for disaster recovery. To maximize the performance of its applications, MedWest is using a "FLASH 1st" strategy, leveraging the EMC FAST Suite. In addition, MedWest replaced its Bridgehead and Tivoli Storage Manager backup software and tape systems with EMC Avamar® deduplication backup software and system.

Customer Quotes:

Greg Copen, Chief Information Officer, MedWest

"From a utilization standpoint, our virtualized VNX infrastructure is phenomenal.  We are helping our hospital clinicians and administrators work faster and more effectively."

"When it comes to managing, storing and protecting our information, EMC is always the first call we make. The products are rock solid—everything just works."

Bill Driver, Systems Administrator, MedWest

"It seems every other week we're asked to support new applications.  We now can get these environments set up within hours instead of the weeks it used to take. Our infrastructure is no longer a bottleneck. EMC is allowing us to grow our environment at the pace our management expects so we can support our company's strategic goals."

"The FAST Suite gives us the extra boost we need during peak periods by automatically moving data to Flash drives. It gives us peace of mind knowing that when we add a physician practice or install an application requiring a lot of resources, we don't have to worry about performance."

"We have achieved a duplication rate of 98% with Avamar and we're completing full daily backups in just about three hours.  Before, with tape, our backups were running 24x7; one backup would complete and another would kick off. I used to spend five hours weekly on backup administration, but with Avamar, now spend five or ten minutes a week on backup administration."

Additional Resources:

• Learn more about EMC VNX, Avamar, and unified storage
• Connect with EMC via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and ECN  

About EMC

EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing.  Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyze their most valuable asset — information — in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way. Additional information about EMC can be found at www.EMC.com.

EMC, VNX, Unisphere and Avamar are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners.

SOURCE EMC Corporation