With 276 beds, Wheeling Hospital has supported the Northern Panhandle of West Virginia, Eastern Ohio and parts of Pennsylvania since 1850. The hospital’s 600-plus doctors and nurses rely heavily on its IT services to provide the latest patient registration details and electronic health records. It’s essential that the system is fast and smooth.
The hospital’s IT infrastructure, including an EMC storage area network (SAN) array, was on its last legs, and overnight database backups were taking up to ten hours to complete, often running right into the morning rush. At the same time, Wheeling Hospital needed to upgrade to the newest version of their clinical information system to ensure compliance but couldn’t have much downtime. The hospital also was concerned with costs and scalability. That’s when Wheeling Hospital turned to Dell.
The hospital was intrigued when their sales team proposed the idea of deploying a hybrid flash Dell Compellent solution, including both write-intensive and read-intensive flash drives as well as spinning-disk. The performance of the database tier was critical to the hospital, but it also wanted spinning-disk storage for less critical systems. The two separate tiers of flash and another bottom tier of spinning disk have allowed Wheeling Hospital to achieve their IT goals and to do it cost-effectively when compared with EMC.
The other benefits of the Dell Compellent solution included:
Smooth upgrade to latest version of clinical software in tight timeframe
Wheeling had a hard deadline of one month to upgrade to the new clinical information system and benefitted from a very quick turnaround from Dell.
Shorter backup times and faster performance lead to better patient care
Wheeling Hospital dramatically improved the performance of its clinical platform once it implemented its new storage, server and networking technologies.
Powerful storage capabilities at a third of the cost
The hospital now has much stronger storage performance for a fraction of the cost it would have spent on updating their storage needs with EMC.
Storage flexibility and simplified administration
Wheeling Hospital administrators have more flexibility than before in terms of allocating storage to support clinical functions.
More time to focus on new hospital technology deployments
Because administration is simpler, the hospital’s IT staff has more time to spend on important new technology initiatives.
Better scalability and strong support
The organization now has a better ability to scale its environment to meet future growth.
Wheeling Hospital decided to displace their existing EMC technology and instead work with their channel partner and Dell to implement two Dell Compellent SC8000 flash-optimized arrays, each with 60TB of storage. In addition, the primary array is optimized with different flash drive types and spinning disk storage, and the secondary SAN features two tiers of spinning-disk storage at a colocation site. The hospital also deployed ten PowerEdge R720 rack servers, as well as two PowerEdge R910s for its database platform. Additionally, Wheeling Hospital upgraded its networking environment from 1-Gigabit switches to four Dell Networking 8132 switches, which provide 10-Gigabit Ethernet capabilities.
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