IBM Systems Solution Brief Epic and IBM POWER8 High scalability for healthcare workloads For healthcare organizations, the adoption and optimization of Highlights electronic medical records (EMRs) is becoming more of an imperative every day. As healthcare networks grow larger and more complex, ® ™ • Scalability: IBM POWER8 servers are hardware systems that may have worked fine in the past are now being optimized specifically for Epic workloads, and have demonstrated a new high-water stretched to their limits. mark for performance on Epic workloads. IBM Power Systems has an extensive track record of providing the • Simplicity: With POWER8, most organizations can run their entire Epic server infrastructure needed to support EMRs. For over 10 years, workload using a simpler, more reliable IBM has collaborated with Epic, a leading healthcare software vendor, symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) to help customers better manage their healthcare environments. Now, configuration. healthcare customers can take advantage of POWER8, the most • Reliability: POWER8 has a number of RAS high-performance Power Systems offering yet. improvements over previous IBM servers, including error avoidance and self-healing The new POWER8 offering is well positioned to help healthcare capabilities, and is part of an IBM server family that has consistently demonstrated organizations manage the new generation of healthcare requirements, industry-leading reliability. offering the scalability, simplicity, and reliability that today’s Epic workloads demand. • POWER8 integrates with IBM FlashSystem™ storage technology to create the ideal platform for running Epic workloads. In addition, integrating POWER8 with IBM FlashSystem storage technology helps create an even stronger platform for running Epic workloads. Scalability Epic implementations range from small hospitals to fully integrated regional healthcare networks that serve millions of patients. Naturally, as integrated healthcare networks continue to grow larger, scalability — both in the amount of data stored and the number of concurrent users that can be served — is a top priority. IBM Systems Solution Brief POWER8 represents a giant step forward for what healthcare Simplicity users can accomplish with their Epic workloads, as the The POWER8 advantage is about much more than just good POWER8 architecture has set a new high-water mark for benchmark results. These high scalability numbers can power and scalability. translate to concrete—and immediate—business advantages for healthcare organizations. With the higher levels of scalability Epic measures application scalability using a metric known as offered by POWER8, large healthcare organizations may Global References per second (GRefs), which represents the now be able to cut down on complexity by deploying a more number of times per second that the database is referenced. straightforward, cost-effective Epic implementation. Epic rates platforms based on the number of GRefs they can perform without degradation of response time. Recent test The Epic application can be deployed using one of two results demonstrate the increased power and scalability of different topologies: POWER8 for Epic workloads. As the table below shows, POWER8 servers can achieve a similar level of scalability as SMP: Symmetric multiprocessing, where users access the POWER7® servers while using fewer cores, resulting in a database directly, without any intermediary processes. per-core performance increase of 33 percent. On a system level, POWER8 systems achieved a level of scalability more ECP: Enterprise Caché Protocol, where an application server than twice that of POWER7 systems. acts as an intermediary, offloading some of the processing from the main production database. ECP is used for POWER7+ POWER8 POWER8 POWER8 environments that have a very large number of concurrent Machine 780 S824 E850 E870 Epic users, and therefore need very high levels of scalability. type (32 cores) (24 cores) (48 cores) (56 cores) Offloading processing to application servers allows these environments to achieve the level of scalability needed to SMP GRefs 3.4 million 3.6 million 6 million 8.6 million serve many Epic users at once. ECP GRefs 7 million 7 million 14.5 million 14.5 million Although ECP is an effective method of serving many concurrent Epic users, it also creates more complexity and cost, due to the need for additional servers and the increased POWER8 architecture optimized for Epic licensing costs those servers bring. IBM POWER8 engineers worked with Epic, as well as InterSystems, the developer of Caché (the Epic operational POWER8’s increased scalability helps healthcare organizations database) to develop enhancements to the POWER8 avoid complex ECP arrangements, allowing them to operate architecture that were specifically designed to optimize Epic a simpler SMP configuration. This added simplicity will workloads. As a result, POWER8 platforms offer unsurpassed leave them well positioned to succeed in the era of demanding scalability for Epic deployments, and provide excellent Epic workloads. configuration flexibility and system growth potential. Reliability Here are a few examples of enhancements the IBM team IBM POWER8 servers are specifically designed with developed specifically to handle Epic workloads better: reliability, availability and serviceability in mind. POWER8 systems incorporate more cores, as well as threading and • Balanced processor speed and inter-processor cache capacity enhancements. This increased capacity can communications bandwidth improve overall server reliability by doing more work per • Reduced the maximum number of “hops” required for processor socket. communication between any two processors • Increased both memory capacity and memory bandwidth • Collaborated with InterSystems to enhance the design of Caché for faster processing 2 IBM Systems Solution Brief When compared to POWER7 servers, POWER8 features a The same ITIC survey also recognized IBM POWER for its more integrated design that also contributes to greater reliability. security, which is another key aspect in ensuring reliability. A number of components that were located outside the When asked to name which servers provided excellent processor in POWER7 have now been integrated into the security (with “excellent security” meaning no security POWER8 design, resulting in fewer separate modules. breaches, less than 5 minutes per year applying security POWER8 also includes numerous advancements in RAS patches, and no system crashes due to security issues), a design and technology, such as increased soft error avoidance, higher percentage of survey respondents named POWER self-healing capabilities, and error recovery and mitigation. than named any x86 server. To learn more about POWER8’s RAS improvements, read the POWER RAS white paper. Percent of customers rated "excellent security" The reliability of IBM server hardware has also been recognized by industry analysts. In the 2014 Reliability Survey from Information Technology Intelligence Consulting1, IBM servers were named the most reliable for the sixth year in a row. By polling C-level executives and IT managers from over 600 organizations, ITIC found that IBM POWER servers were at least twice as available as x86 servers. While POWER servers running on AIX experienced only five minutes of downtime per year, the x86 servers included in the survey experienced at least 10 minutes of downtime a year, and in some cases significantly more. Table 2: More customers rated POWER “excellent security” than any x86 server. Integration with IBM FlashSystem storage In order to get the best results possible for Epic workloads, healthcare organizations can use POWER8 servers together with IBM FlashSystem storage. The two offerings complement one another to form the ideal platform for running Epic workloads. FlashSystem storage offers extreme performance, ultra-low latency, macro efficiency and enterprise-grade reliability. Together, all of these characteristics can help healthcare organizations address the data challenges associated with Epic application environments, making FlashSystem the ideal complement for POWER8. When a configuration including a FlashSystem storage unit and a POWER8 server was tested as part of an Epic benchmark, the results demonstrated that the combination was 11 times faster than a combination using equivalent disk-based storage, and provided a read latency that was 20 times lower than Epic’s recommendations. Table 1: POWER is at least twice as available as x86. 3 To learn more about how POWER8 and FlashSystem combine to form the ideal platform for Epic workloads, read the IBM FlashSystem for Epic white paper. About IBM healthcare solutions With more than 8,000 employees dedicated to healthcare, © Copyright IBM Corporation 2015 including more than 60 medical doctors and 350 healthcare IBM Corporation professionals, IBM has completed more than 3,000 successful IBM Systems healthcare transformation initiatives, ranging from small Route 100 Somers, NY 10589 hospitals to national healthcare projects. IBM holds more than 600 patents in the life sciences, healthcare and medical Produced in the United States of America August 2015 device fields. We have been an active participant with governments working to lay the foundations of a 21st century IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, FlashSystem, Power Systems, POWER7 and POWER8 are trademarks of International Business Machines Corp., healthcare system. Together with our healthcare clients and registered