Warren Memorial Hospital gains 10X performance saving 66 per cent

Gridstore™ says that Warren Memorial Hospital in Friend Nebraska, selected as one of the top 20 critical access hospitals in the nation, has chosen Gridstore to provide its innovative storage technology allowing them to utilise the most modern technology solution that would provide more functionality and capacity within a community hospital’s budget.

Included in its vision of the future is Warren Memorial Hospital’s drive to acquire state-of-the-art technology in order to provide the optimum healthcare experience for every patient. In its modernisation efforts, Warren Memorial decided that prohibitively high licensing fees were reason enough for it to search for an alternative to its NetApp and VMware environment. CIO Matt Scott notes that Gridstore appeared at the right time and provided a potential solution to the hospital’s need for improved performance and scalability, as well as reduced acquisition and maintenance costs.

“Warren Memorial is a small, critical access hospital. We licensed VMware and purchased NetApp, and the annual fees were huge, with Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) up to $50K per year - and we did not need that expense. It was time to consider other options. We briefly looked at HP and EMC, and then Gridstore came calling.”

Warren Memorial Hospital made the move away from VMware to Hyper-V with a key goal of optimising I/Os on VMs. Its new platform includes Microsoft System Center managing Hyper-V servers clustered together with three Gridstore Performance Nodes for storage in a company-wide installation, supporting all of the IT functions within the hospital. “Our primary gain is performance improvements,” said Scott. “We are at wire speed and running in real time since the Gridstore installation. Our SQL database and exchange servers are performing much better. It used to take three to five minutes for our staff to log in, now the same function takes 30 seconds at most. Gridstore is easy to manage and is way simpler than NetApp. By being able to establish and manage QoS on our most critical apps, we can now spend less time with technology and more time treating our patients, whic h is of utmost importance to us.”

Warren Memorial Hospital realised several benefits in implementing Gridstore:
· Performance enhancements from the Gridstore installation were significant. The hospital has realised a 6-10X improvement in performance with a 2/3 reduction in cost
· 40 virtual servers and 30 to 40 desktops that are now up and ready to use on demand
· Digital X-Rays are now available and electronically stored on site, rather than archived
· The hospital is now in compliance with Medicare and Medicaid incentive programs for the “meaningful use” of certified technology to improve patient care

Scott added, “Storage is like a closet, eventually you are going to fill it up and need more space. We can see how it will be straightforward to expand the Gridstore grid here at Warren Memorial in the future. We would not hesitate to add more Gridstore as we need it.”