EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC), the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today announced that Aspirus, a non-profit system of hospitals, clinics and other healthcare facilities with more than 4,200 employees and more than 400 licensed inpatient beds in its system, is helping its practitioners streamline workflows while reducing IT administrative costs leveraging EMC solutions and services for data center consolidation and virtualization.
Glynn Hollis, Aspirus' Director of Technical Services, said, "Our patient records have grown tremendously as we've acquired other hospitals and opened new clinics. As our infrastructure continues to grow to support this larger healthcare network, we're always looking for IT solutions to ensure our application performance remains high."
Based in Wausau, Wis., Aspirus deployed a tiered information infrastructure to maximize the performance and efficiency of clinical and business information workflows required for optimum care delivery. Aspirus relies on an EMC CLARiiON® CX4 networked storage system with enterprise flash drives delivering ultra-high performance and business continuity for its Epic electronic medical record (EMR) and clinical management applications, CLARiiON CX3 and EMC Celerra for its Sectra PACS radiology and cardiology imaging systems. Aspirus archives its medical images using an EMC Centera® content-addressed storage and will soon use EMC SourceOne™ to archive its Microsoft Exchange emails. Additionally, Aspirus replaced Symantec NetBackup with EMC NetWorker® and EMC Avamar® backup software to provide data deduplication and centralized, automated backup and recovery.
Tom Whalen, Aspirus' IT Server and Storage Infrastructure Team Leader, said, "Deploying the industry-leading EMC CLARiiON with flash technology has helped us deliver fast performance and reduced our end-user read cycles from 12 to 15 milliseconds to 1 to 1.5 milliseconds. And, our clinical batch processing times have been reduced by 430 percent. As a result, our physicians, radiologists and administrative employees are able to rapidly retrieve clinical and patient information to provide a higher level of clinical service."
Aspirus has also actively consolidated its IT resources to increase efficiency and lower costs. This includes consolidating all of its applications, such as Sectra PACS, Epic, Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server databases and VMware virtual machines using the CLARiiON networked storage system. This consolidation provides Aspirus with the flexibility to meet its storage performance needs while reducing power and cooling costs and enabling a centralized and simpler management point.
Additionally, Aspirus has embraced the VMware infrastructure to consolidate its blade server technology and Citrix environments for its Epic EMR.