PURE STORAGE CASE STUDY | BEND MEMORIAL CLINIC
Bend Memorial Clinic is committed to offering its patients the highest quality of care,
and devotes its IT resources to supporting that goal. When lagging performance of its legacy storage
system caused frequent and severe slowdowns in key applications used by caregivers, the clinic
installed an all-flash array from Pure Storage. Since then, performance problems have disappeared,
implementation of a virtual desktop infrastructure has moved forward successfully, and the IT staff
spends virtually no time managing storage.
PURE STORAGE GIVES BEND MEMORIAL CLINIC A CLEAN BILL OF HEALTH
FOR STORAGE
BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION
Dramatic improvements in response
time of key applications for serving
clients improved patient and
employee satisfaction. IT staff spend
almost no time managing storage,
freeing them to focus on improving
operational efficiency and the quality
of time doctors spend with patients.
GEO
North America
INDUSTRY
Healthcare
“We have been able to put so
much more on the array than
we ever thought possible.”
Allen Fox, IS Infrastructure Manager
Bend Memorial Clinic (BMC) is the largest independent healthcare provider in central
Oregon, with more than 130 doctors covering 30 specialties. The physician-owned clinic
strives to be the most trusted partner in the region for comprehensive care, reflected in
its use of the TotalCare umbrella name.
Like all healthcare organizations, BMC is applying advanced technology to improve
patient outcomes while making business operations more efficient. The IT infrastructure
is 100% virtualized, with servers running on VMware® vSphere® and thin clients
supported on a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) with Citrix® XenDesktop®.
For many years, BMC used Allscripts for its electronic health record (EHR) software, but
in 2015 decided to switch to Epic. In preparation for the change, Epic conducted a review
of BMC’s IT infrastructure to identify potential areas of improvement in performance and
operational efficiency. One of the areas identified was the clinic’s storage infrastructure,
which BMC already knew had problems.
“We had very inconsistent performance across our storage network,” recalled Allen Fox,
IS infrastructure manager for BMC. “There was a lot of contention for resources in the
array, and when that would happen we’d see huge slowdowns across the board — very
high latency, very slow delivery of applications and files. On an almost daily basis we
were seeing huge performance problems.”
The people most affected by these problems were patient-facing providers like doctors
and nurses, who were experiencing long delays in accessing patient records or other key
medical information. Ultimately, Fox noted, the delays extracted a cost in terms of patient
satisfaction and provider productivity. “And if anyone wanted to run a report during the
work day, forget it!”
“CRAZY” CLAIMS FOR PURE STORAGE JUSTIFIED
Fox said the IT team tried numerous tactics to mitigate the problems caused by the
legacy storage system, “but at the end of the day it’s still spinning disk, and there’s only
so many IOPS to go around.” Fox articulated the dilemma he faced: “I don’t need more
capacity, but if I want to get the performance I needed, I have to buy more disks.”
PURE STORAGE CASE STUDY | BEND MEMORIAL CLINIC
COMPANY:
Bend Memorial Clinic
www.bendmemorialclinic.com
USE CASE:
• VSI – VMware® vSphere®
• VDI – Citrix® XenDesktop®
• Database – Epic Caché
CHALLENGES:
• Inconsistent legacy storage system
performance caused frequent and
severe slowdowns in application
response times.
• Frequent lags in VDI storage
performance negatively impacted
patient satisfaction and the
productivity of care providers.
• A planned transition from Allscripts to
Epic software required substantially
higher IOPS performance from the
storage system.
IT TRANSFORMATION:
• Virtual machine log-in times have
dropped from 1.5 minutes to seconds.
• Support tickets for slow performance
have vanished.
• Barriers impeding a VDI rollout
were removed.
“Since we installed Pure
Storage, we’ve had zero
support tickets related to
performance complaints.”
Allen Fox, IS Infrastructure Manager
Fox said the IT team wanted to know more about flash technology. After talking to a
number of storage suppliers, as well as IT departments at other healthcare organizations,
BMC asked Pure Storage to provide details on the performance a customer might expect
from its products.
“At first we thought the numbers Pure Storage gave us were crazy,” Fox recalled. “But we
talked to customer references and they confirmed that these numbers — for key metrics
like latency, bandwidth and IOPS — were what they saw in their own shops.”
Pure Storage offered an array for a proof-of-concept trial, but Fox and his team declined.
“We had done our homework; we had seen a demo and talked to customers who already
were using Pure, so we had verification of its claims, and we knew what we wanted.”
A Pure Storage FlashArray was purchased.
EASY INSTALLATION FOLLOWED BY SHARPLY IMPROVED PERFORMANCE
Installation of the Pure Storage array took about two hours, which Fox said “far exceeded
our expectations.” The clinic’s previous spinning-disk system took two days to deploy,
he noted. “Pure is so simple. You plug it in, zone it, and you’re off to the races.” Data and
applications were migrated onto the Pure array in phases, but only because the legacy
storage system could not match the high data-transfer rates of Pure.
Installation of the Pure Storage array “had an immediate impact on end-users,” Fox
reported. Log-in times for virtual desktops “went from 1½ minutes to nothing. Since we
installed Pure, we’ve had zero support tickets related to poor performance.”
BMC now runs all of its applications — with the exception of imaging — on Pure Storage.
As a result, latency levels are consistently less than 1ms across all environments.
But the biggest impact from moving to Pure Storage, he added, was in the Citrix
XenDesktop VDI environment. “We had held back our deployment of VDI because
we were taking a performance hit on the network side in order to support the virtual
desktops. But with Pure installed, we no longer had to make that tradeoff.”
The productivity of IT managers also has been improved. “It now takes us just 20 minutes
to re-create 400 virtual machines. And, we were able to virtualize Dragon (the voicerecognition software) on VDI, which we weren’t able to do before,” because of latency
problems in the storage.
To extend storage capacity, the Pure Storage de-duplication and compression features
mean “we have been able to put so much more on the array than we ever thought
possible,” saving on capital costs as well as operating expenses. Total data reduction has
been 10:1 across all applications.
With storage-related problems a thing of the past, Fox and his team were able to
successfully complete the transition to Epic software.
STORAGE MANAGEMENT GREATLY SIMPLIFIED
Deploying Pure Storage has resulted in “greatly simplified” storage management, Fox
reported. “We don’t have to spend precious time and resources isolating workloads. We
just set up VMs, attach them to a data store on Pure, and we’re good to go. It makes life a
lot easier for the IT team.”
The Pure Storage management simplicity means that storage administration tasks can be
shared among the four-person IT staff regardless of whether anyone has a background
in storage. “We no longer have to worry about complex tasks like partitioning workloads,
or verifying that there’s enough storage for a LUN. With the spinning-disk system there
PURE STORAGE CASE STUDY | BEND MEMORIAL CLINIC
were severe limits on how you could use storage that wouldn’t be evident to a VM
administrator. But with Pure, it’s so much easier.”
“We spend at most 1% of
our workweek on storagerelated tasks.”
Allen Fox, IS Infrastructure Manager
Fox said he now spends, at most, 1% of his workweek on storage-related tasks.
In the year since acquiring its Pure Storage array, BMC has done two major software
upgrades and added another shelf to the array — all accomplished during production
hours with no interruption or impact on users. “In fact,” Fox added, “we didn’t even do the
software upgrade ourselves. Pure did them for us, remotely.”
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