Nimble Storage Predictive Flash Platform Underpins Hutchinson Clinic Patient Care System

Nimble Storage, the leader in predictive flash storage, today announced that Hutchinson Clinic has selected the Nimble Storage Predictive Flash Platform, comprising of Adaptive Flash and All Flash arrays, to support a new disaster recovery (DR) strategy, and accelerate the performance of electronic health records, billing, and practice management systems. By improving the Clinic's IT operations, the staff will be able to access patient-related data faster, allowing them to better provide patients with comprehensive medical and surgical care.

The Hutchinson Clinic, based in Hutchinson, Kansas, is comprised of more than 90 physicians and providers and nearly 650 employees. To meet the requirements of evolving healthcare laws, the Clinic modified the structure of its records system which now enables high levels of analytics and data mining. The Clinic's poorly designed IT infrastructure lacked the ability to scale, forcing the IT organization to constantly hit limits on its database servers. To address the challenge, the Clinic deployed Nimble Adaptive Flash CS400 and CS700 arrays, achieving greater performance and non-disruptive scalability.

Moving forward, the IT organization intends to take full advantage of the Nimble Unified Flash Fabric which enables flash performance for all enterprise applications by unifying All Flash and Adaptive Flash arrays into a single consolidation architecture with common data services. Working closely with ISG Technology, the Clinic has purchased and deployed the All Flash AF7000 array to support massive databases for electronic health records, patient check-in and billing systems. The Adaptive Flash CS700 supports more than 200 virtual machines running file, exchange and web servers. To support its new DR strategy, the Clinic will also deploy the Adaptive Flash CS400 as a replication target and the CS235 as a Veeam back up repository. The entire infrastructure will be deployed as a SmartStack reference architecture-based solution, comprising of Cisco UCS integrated infrastructure and the Nimble arrays.

"As a Nimble Storage partner for the last five years, we experienced great success with the Adaptive Flash CS-Series arrays. We expect the same, if not more, interest in the Nimble All-Flash arrays based on the unique benefits of the platform," said Miles Franz, director, strategic solutions, ISG Technology. "Hutchinson Clinic was ready for a highly scalable storage solution that was able to support a cost-effective data protection strategy. Nimble was able to meet these requirements, while providing simplified management and the added features of InfoSight. I believe the depth and granularity of Nimble's predictive analytics will fuel rapid adoption of the Unified Flash Fabric by our customers."

"There are four things that really stand out about our Nimble deployment -- ease of deployment, the interface is easy to configure and manage, and the proactive support," said Christopher Swartz, senior network and server analyst at Hutchinson Clinic. "Most importantly, the performance is unmatchable. Our staff is working with patients in real-time and need to retrieve patient records quickly. In migrating to Nimble arrays we saw all data-related delays go away -- no more patients waiting to be checked in, delay in doctors pulling up records -- all data is flowing faster. This deployment gave me the confidence to expand my operations without having to worry about any system performance impact."

InfoSight predictive analytics provides Hutchinson Clinic's IT team with greater transparency, including the ability to see the performance of specific virtual machines (VMs). 

"The VMVision feature allows my team to see if there are specific VMs that have poor performance, and the team uses those analytics to see if things look too busy," said Swartz. "With InfoSight I have a lot of power at my fingertips, a lot more than I had before, which allows me to do my job more efficiently. Previously I couldn't tell how busy the arrays were, but now with the analytics I get from Nimble it's a much more powerful appliance."