FOCUS HEALTH
EMIS sought a provider that would be flexible, and which could offer a system that would scale. Such a partner would also have to understand how to manage this, and demonstrate predictable storage costs.
Throughout the process, the team also needed to carefully consider that EMIS Web, with its centrally stored and managed records would also dramatically drive up access from a much wider group of users, on demand. Importantly too, it would need to be secure. The chosen solution would also have to comply with the accreditation requirements of NHS Connecting for Health, the body that supervises IT solutions for NHS organisations in England.
The Solution “We had mid-range storage systems in place, but they would not scale,” continued McGarry. “It quickly became obvious that we needed a solution capable of delivering tier one performance and so we looked at alternative providers in this space. Pillar Data Systems had the best system on offer so we made a strategic business decision to move forward with its Axiom product. In a very competitive marketplace, Pillar was also best placed to offer us the most effective contract terms.”
EMIS took finding a new provider very seriously and actually spent nine months trialing and considering vendors and their products. Having compared systems from a range of firms EMIS settled on Pillar Data Systems and its Axiom product - from which a key driver was the fact that the EMIS team could
adapt the Axiom to suit their business needs without revoking the associated guarantee against the product, which McGarry describes as ‘unique’. The resulting implementation has already lead to immediate performance improvements across the board, while the sheer volume of data is also a lot easier to manage. The Pillar Axiom solution was able to address all the technical and commercial requirements that EMIS had stipulated.
The Pillar Axiom gave a highly scalable unified storage platform that was able to adapt for current and future needs through a choice of connectivity protocols and storage classes. This meant that the initial SAN based deployment could easily have NAS added to the storage pool at a later date.
The system was designed so that it could easily scale capacity over time, but also it would uniquely offer linear scalability of performance, eliminating any concerns about bottlenecks. Utilisation of storage was a key factor from a financial consideration. Pillar typically offers double the industry standard utilisation through its unique architecture. “One of the benefits that was seen from the new storage implementation was that the utilisation rates of the storage system meant we were able to offer far more capacity with the new storage platform than with the old for the same price point,” said Chris McGarry.
In order to ensure a smooth implementation, the technical team from Pillar worked closely with their EMIS counterparts, which was another key to the overall success of the project. Now the
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