Sanbolic's Melio Software Increases Availability of Mission Critical Data at Katholisches Klinikum Ruhrgebiet Nord

WALTHAM, Mass., Oct. 1, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Sanbolic announced today that Katholisches Klinikum Ruhrgebiet Nord (KKRN) GmbH is utilizing the company's Melio FS clustered file system to assure on-demand, high availability of its mission-critical data. The 1,000 bed hospital located in North Ruhrgebiet Germany selected Sanbolic's Melio FS in 2012 as a direct replacement for its legacy Microsoft CSV system. With the deployment of the Melio data acceleration software, KKRN immediately realized a 10 percent increase in the performance of its clinical and operational applications and has reduced unplanned downtime by 90 percent.

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More than 2,200 employees, including 200 doctors, rely upon KKRN's AGFA Orbis clinical information system for everything from documentation and dictation, to the sharing of medical images. Other critical systems handle business functions ranging from human resources to finances. The hospital's IT infrastructure is virtualized by Microsoft Hyper-V and includes approximately 150 Windows Servers and 1,000 PCs, supported by five SANs storing roughly 20.5 terabytes of vital data. KKRN had been using Microsoft's Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) to enable the migration of virtual machines in a Windows Server 2008R2 environment. However, the hospital began encountering stability problems that caused one CSV to fail each month, completely disabling its guest systems.

To solve this problem, in July 2012, KKRN switched from Microsoft's CSV to Sanbolic's Melio FS, deploying it on two Hyper-V clusters of four nodes, each supported by SANs powered by DataCore Software and HP. This change immediately resulted in a 10 percent increase in application performance, as well as the ability to take snapshots of guest systems before making changes to them, which greatly eases the rollback process, when it's necessary. KKRN administrators are now able to create data snapshots with two mouse clicks and access them directly on the Windows system, without additional work such as mapping the LUN. Melio has also reduced unplanned downtime of the Hyper-V clusters by 90 percent.

"Having immediate, 24x7 access to patient records and other crucial medical data is paramount to administering high-quality patient care—downtime simply cannot happen," said Marc Moennikes, IT Administrator, Katholisches Klinikum Ruhrgebiet Nord GmbH. "Sanbolic's Melio FS has enabled us to drastically reduce unplanned downtime as well as boost efficiency, for instance, we are now able to take our snapshots in just two minutes which is an enormous time saver for our staff."

Melio FS is a symmetrical clustered file system designed for application scalability and agility in physical, virtual and cloud deployments. It provides shared access to data from multiple servers, enabling high availability and scalability of applications, as well as greatly simplified storage provisioning and management. Melio FS is the core of Sanbolic's software-defined data acceleration platform; it gives organizations unparalleled flexibility as a server, hypervisor, storage and protocol agnostic solution.

"Melio allows medical facilities like KKRN to reap the benefits of software-defined data acceleration," said Momchil Michailov, CEO of Sanbolic. "Our intelligent file sharing system layers business critical application capability on top of customers' existing storage architectures to speed performance while reducing costs and vendor lock-in. Melio's workload agnostic approach gives organizations the flexibility set their own quality of service (QoS) components, optimize the management of data across any infrastructure, and take control of the economics of data access and storage."

To read the full case study on KKRN's deployment of Melio, please visit Sanbolic's website: http://sanbolic.com/kkrn-eliminates-90-unplanned-downtime-with-meliofs/

About Katholisches Klinikum Ruhrgebiet Nord

KKRN Katholisches Klinikum Ruhrgebiet Nord GmbH is the largest hospital company in North Ruhrgebiet with 23 medical departments, 1,000 hospital beds and providing services to more than 34,500 inpatients each year. With about 2,220 employees - including approximately 200 physicians alone - KKRN is one of the largest employers in the district of Recklinghausen.

About Sanbolic, Inc. 
Sanbolic provides a software-defined data acceleration platform that eliminates the "storage tax" on application performance, availability and scalability. The company's Melio platform combines a massively scalable distributed clustered file system with other advanced technologies to optimize data management across any enterprise infrastructure. This capability makes data more accessible and useful, and enables enterprises to scale out applications without requiring budget-busting storage infrastructure upgrades. Sanbolic is privately held and based in Waltham, Mass.

For more information, please visit www.sanbolic.com or contact us at [email protected].

© Sanbolic, Inc. 2013. Sanbolic, Melio, Latency Targeted Allocator, LTA, and AppCluster are trademarks of Sanbolic, Inc. All other brands and product names contained in the press release may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

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SOURCE Sanbolic