Willis-Knighton Health System Receives a Healthy Boost from EMC Symmetrix VMAX

CHICAGO, Nov. 28, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- RSNA 2011 -- EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) today announced that Willis-Knighton Health System, a Shreveport, La.-based healthcare provider comprising  four hospital campuses, has deployed EMC® Symmetrix® VMAX® storage systems to ensure more than five-9's availability for its rapidly growing electronic medical record (EMR) applications, which include virtualized MEDITECH healthcare information system, Siemens Soarian healthcare process management, and Sectra PACS imaging as well as other mission-critical applications such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases, and Microsoft Exchange email. Willis-Knighton considered IBM and Dell Compellent storage solutions, but chose Symmetrix VMAX for its performance and availability capabilities.

Customer Benefits:

• Increased Performance—Willis-Knighton has increased performance of its healthcare applications by 35% with VMAX.
• Maximized Availability—Its VMAX system's redundant, high-availability architecture is providing Willis-Knighton with more than five-9's availability, allowing staff to access EMRs in less than a second.
• Increased Capacity—Willis-Knighton's IT environment has increased capacity by 70% using EMC VMAX with the ability to scale to handle increased data growth.
• Return on Investment Achieved – Willis-Knighton's IT department is able to spend less time managing storage and more time on new projects to enhance services to patients thanks to EMC's intuitive management tools and tight integration between VMAX and vSphere™.

Willis-Knighton's IT infrastructure was expanding rapidly due to advances in imaging technology and its ability to service more patients.  With PACS images increasing by more than 30 terabytes over the past two years, Willis-Knighton realized it needed to update its IT infrastructure with next-generation storage technology that would scale as the healthcare provider's needs increased, while also maintaining high performance levels.  

Willis-Knighton is also using EMC TimeFinder local replication software and EMC NetWorker® unified backup and recovery solution for backing up its mission-critical healthcare management and operations applications to an EMC Data Domain® deduplication storage system. In addition, Willis-Knighton is implementing EMC SRDF/A for replication of data from the VMAX in its production data center to a second VMAX in its disaster recovery site.

Customer Quote

Charles Laster, Willis-Knighton's Chief Information Officer

"The precision of a CT scan is now up-to 128 slices, which represents a significant increase in data that we need to store, protect and manage compared to a year ago.  We have to ensure that vital medical information like this can be retrieved by our health practitioners any time of day or night.  The quality of patient care depends on such access."

"I've been very impressed with EMC's maniacal focus on customer service. We've worked with a lot of vendors and the top-notch service and support we get from EMC are strong differentiators.  VMAX gives us a very versatile platform on which to build.  We strive to have the latest and greatest technology to become more competitive and deliver new, more advanced services to our patients.  And with VMAX, when a physician or nurse goes into our EMRs to get test results or view an image, we're confident that the information will be on their screen in an instant."

Jonathan Lee, Network Administrator Supervisor at Willis-Knighton

"The power and scalability of the VMAX and its tight integration with VMware vSphere are central to our virtualization plans.  We've already virtualized our MEDITECH system and expect to have 40% of our infrastructure virtualized within the next 12 to 18 months.  With VMAX's built-in management features and EMC's Ionix ControlCenter software, we have excellent visibility into our performance status and storage growth. Because we spend less time managing storage, we have a smaller IT department today than five years ago even though our environment has grown exponentially. As a result, we have more time to take on new projects that enhance the quality of our healthcare."

Additional Resources

• Learn more about EMC VMAX
• Learn more about NetWorker
• Learn more about EMC Data Domain
• Learn more about EMC in healthcare
• 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. VMAX, NetWorker and Data Domain are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. VMware and VMware vSphere are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions.  The use of the word "partner" or "partnership" does not imply a legal partnership relationship between VMware and any other company. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

 

SOURCE EMC Corporation