SUNY Buffalo medical school reduces total cost of ownership for electronic health record solution by 40% with • Storage storage and VMware • Virtualization

“With the virtualized environment, we’re able to provide five-nines availability.”

Eric Warner, Assistant Director, Medical Computing, The State University of New York at Buffalo, School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences

Customer Profile Company: SUNY Buffalo Industry: Education Benefits Country: United States • 30 minutes to install and configure Students: 1,000 iSCSI storage Faculty & Staff: 820 • 40% reduction in total cost of ownership for EHR solution Web: www.smbs.buffalo.edu; www.ubmd.com • Five-nines availability with virtualized servers and storage Business Need • Network administrators can State University of New York at Buffalo and the School of Medicine & Biomedical Sciences were looking to upgrade their Allscripts provision storage in minutes instead electronic health record (EHR) software and roll the solution out to of hours their associated medical practices, but wanted to limit the hardware, • Automatic load balancing improves software and professional services costs of a conventional Fibre performance while reducing Channel SAN deployment. complexity • 75% less time to restore data from Solution snapshots vs. tape Deploy the electronic health record solution in a virtualized environment using VMware software on Dell™ PowerEdge™ servers • 33% less disk capacity needed with Dell EqualLogic™ iSCSI storage arrays. compared to conventional SAN • 4.5 TB of primary storage reclaimed through thin provisioning Originally founded in 1846 as a private medical school, the State University of New York at Buffalo has deep roots in medicine. Faculty at its School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences have contributed to many groundbreaking achievements in healthcare over the years, including an implantable battery-operated cardiac pacemaker, the PSA test for prostate cancer, photodynamic cancer therapy, Infasurf lung surfactant, Talent™ thoracic stent graft and a teleradiology 3D viewer and data transmission system.

UBMD is the practice plan that includes the right choice for many organizations more than 450 physicians who are and for many projects—we use it “The Dell also professors at School of Medicine here for many of our workloads—we and Biomedical Sciences. These thought that EqualLogic would be a EqualLogic and doctors are dedicated to nurturing the better fit, and more cost-effective, for VMware solution next generation of physicians while our EHR deployment,” says Warner. also helping thousands of Western “So I proposed a solution that was a is saving us 40 New Yorkers live healthier lives. Like combination of Dell EqualLogic storage many medical practices, UBMD is percent on the implementing electronic health records in an effort to reduce paperwork and Technology at Work total cost of expedite medical care for its 450 Services ownership for our care providers. Dell™ Support Services electronic health An Alternative To Fibre Channel For several years, Academic Medicine Hardware record system.” had been using an electronic health Dell EqualLogic™ PS6000E, Eric Warner, Assistant Director, record solution from Allscripts, which PS6000X and PS6000XV iSCSI Medical Computing, The State was running on legacy hardware. SAN arrays When the time came to upgrade the University of New York at Buffalo, Dell PowerEdge™ R805 servers School of Medicine and practice plans to the latest version, with AMD® Opteron™ processors Biomedical Sciences Allscripts Enterprise EHR v11, School of Medicine and UBMD decided to Dell PowerEdge R610 servers with ® ® roll out the solution to all 18 practice Intel Xeon processors areas underneath the UBMD umbrella Dell PowerEdge 2950 and 2900 and refresh the underlying server and servers with Intel Xeon processors storage infrastructure. Dell PowerVault™ MD3000 highly “Allscripts told us we could either use available modular disk storage all direct-attached storage or a Fibre arrays Channel SAN,” recalls Eric Warner, Dell PowerVault MD1000 direct- assistant director, medical computing, attached storage arrays School of Medicine and Biomedical Dell PowerVault TL4000 tape Sciences. “Those were the two library approaches that were validated and certified.” Software While these were the recommended Allscripts Enterprise EHR v11 configurations that had previously Microsoft® iSCSI Software Initiator been certified, having just attended a Dell EqualLogic seminar about the Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 benefits of Ethernet-based, iSCSI- Microsoft Windows Server® 2008, attached storage arrays, Warner 2003 worked with Allscripts to pioneer a ® different approach for their deployment. VMware ESXi 3.5, 4.0 “Although Fibre Channel SAN storage is and VMware, using Microsoft iSCSI is incredibly user friendly, and Software Initiator to network the servers administration is even easier,” says to the SAN.” Warner. “I could train my 10-year-old daughter to divvy up storage, connect A Certified Success with an iSCSI software initiator and grab Allscripts engineers worked with Dell to that storage in a matter of minutes. In obtain an evaluation unit and reviewed the Fibre Channel world, that would the EqualLogic hardware along with take us hours, because we’re not Warner’s proposed architecture. storage administrators. With a traditional Impressed with the reliability and SAN, if you’re only divvying up storage performance of the EqualLogic array, once in a while and you’re not they agreed to certify the combination intimately familiar with the processes, of EqualLogic and VMware for use with you can blow away your LUN with one the scanning, Web services, training and misstep. That doesn’t happen with testing modules of Allscripts, with an EqualLogic—any network admin can agreement to conduct further testing provision storage very quickly.” to validate and certify the architecture for all modules. For other Allscripts “Five Nines” Availability For modules, the Dell PowerVault MD3000 Health Records highly available modular disk storage Because virtual servers are automatically arrays and Dell PowerVault MD1000 moved to another physical server in “Using Dell direct-attached storage arrays offer the case of a hardware failure, there EqualLogic storage, the availability required while keeping is less risk of unplanned downtime—a down cost. critical consideration in a healthcare we were able to environment. Planned downtime for “By working with Dell to meet our hardware maintenance is no longer a reduce the capacity project requirements, Allscripts was concern, since IT staff can use VMware able to offer its customers another required for our VMotion to move virtual machines choice and bring its Enterprise solution around with no interruption in service. within reach of more organizations,” solution by one- says Warner. “With the virtualized environment, we’re third because of the able to provide five-nines availability “We found the EqualLogic user interface for the Allscripts environment, and do to be one of the best available on the virtualized storage so cost effectively,” says Warner. “If storage market,” says Neal Purchase, a we’d had to buy a bunch of redundant and the aggregate hardware consultant at Allscripts who physical servers and cluster the solution was one of the engineers that initially performance of without using virtualization, it would evaluated EqualLogic on Warner’s have obviously been much more costly.” behalf. “EqualLogic will likely be one the disks.” of the core storage options we offer Having traditionally used Fibre Channel Neal Purchase, for Allscripts Enterprise once we SAN storage solutions and dedicated Hardware Consultant, Allscripts complete the certification process for application servers, the medical all modules.” school’s IT leaders were skeptical at first. “It took a lot of convincing to Provisioning Storage In Minutes go to a different type of technology,” Instead Of Hours acknowledges Warner. “But especially Two Dell EqualLogic iSCSI storage when we took into consideration arrays—a PS6000XV with SAS drives and the renewal of services costs that we a PS6000E with SATA drives—provide would incur with some vendors after storage for the Allscripts solution, while five years, the Dell EqualLogic arrays Dell PowerEdge R805 servers with and Allscripts-certified Dell PowerEdge VMware ESXi 3.5 hypervisor embedded servers were the hands-down winners. and Microsoft Windows Server 2003 And by purchasing all of the software virtual machines serve as the front through Dell, we have a one-stop shop, end. Dell PowerEdge 2950 servers run which simplifies procurement.” Microsoft SQL Server 2005 database, while a Dell PowerEdge 2900 acts as a 33% Less Disk Required print server. Storage was able to be set Because the Dell EqualLogic SAN up and configured within 30 minutes, controller aggregates the performance without any assistance. of its modular arrays, Allscripts engineers found that less storage With EqualLogic, most traditional capacity was required to achieve the storage management tasks are same application performance when performed by the array, not the compared to deployments using a Fibre administrator. “The setup process Channel SAN. “When we set up Allscripts Enterprise Reclaiming 4.5 TB Through “You just buy a new EqualLogic box, EHR with a conventional Fibre Channel Thin Provisioning connect it to the network, and it makes SAN, we end up using a lot more Warner was so happy with the itself part of the group. I mean it doesn’t spindles to get the performance we EqualLogic arrays that he purchased get any easier than that,” says Warner. need,” explains Purchase. “But with a three more—two PS6000E units with “We won’t have to migrate off of our virtualized storage system, we can get SATA disk and a PS6000X with SAS disk— previous storage, and we don’t have the same performance using fewer to replace some of the medical school’s limitations concerning how far we spindles. Using Dell EqualLogic storage, aging Fibre Channel storage and can scale without purchasing an we were able to reduce the storage consolidate file shares. Dell PowerEdge entirely new storage system. With capacity required for our solution by R610 servers running Microsoft conventional SAN solutions, that can one-third because of the virtualized Windows Server 2008 R2 and VMware be a real problem.” storage and the aggregate performance ESXi 4.0 embedded act as the front end. The medical school is also using the of the disks.” The built-in thin provisioning capabilities built-in snapshotting capabilities of Automatic Load Balancing of EqualLogic are already making the Dell EqualLogic arrays to back up Improves Performance Warner’s life easier when it comes to and restore data quickly. “We haven’t legacy applications that require large played around with it too much on Patented page-based volume storage volumes. the Allscripts side, but we can utilize management on the EqualLogic arrays snapshots to restore data in 75 percent enables automatic movement of data “If an application wants a five-terabyte less time than it takes to get something while the data is in use. This technology volume, we used to have to dedicate off a tape and bring it back,” says provides the foundation for online that storage, even if we knew that only Warner. For tape backups, School of expansion, automatic configuration one terabyte would actually be used in Medicine and Biomedical Sciences uses and load balancing for performance the first year,” Warner explains. “Using a Dell PowerVault TL4000 tape library. optimization—all with continuous the thin provisioning on the EqualLogic, access to data. we can provision that five terabytes 40% Savings In Total Cost Of so the application is happy, but it’s “When I first suggested the EqualLogic Ownership not taking up any more disk space solution, we considered breaking By utilizing flexible, cost-effective than what it’s actually taking up—we the disks up into two virtual storage servers and storage solutions from Dell, can hand the rest of that storage out pools—a SAS pool for performance School of Medicine and Biomedical somewhere else. We’re doing this and a SATA pool for capacity,” says Sciences was able to save money in for two applications right now, and Warner. “But we quickly realized that many of the key areas that contribute to between the two of them we’re saving the EqualLogic boxes automatically total cost of ownership, with the peace around 4.5 terabytes of disk space load-balance themselves, so we put of mind of four-hour support response this year.” everything into one big storage pool times from Dell Support Services. to make things easier. We front-end it Daisy-Chained Storage For “Combining cost of hardware, software, with some SAS drives, throw some SATA Scalability decreased administration time and in the back and don’t worry about it. If Should School of Medicine and reduced services budget, we estimate something’s pounding the storage, the Biomedical Sciences need to add more that the Dell EqualLogic and VMware necessary data will be moved to SAS capacity, there won’t be any “forklift” solution is saving us 40 percent on disk automatically, so we get the higher upgrades to contend with and pay the total cost of ownership for our performance. I’m not aware of any for, since Dell EqualLogic storage is electronic health record system,” other array on the market that designed to scale seamlessly. concludes Warner. does that.”

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