Press Releases

Cambridge Health Alliance Gets Fit With 3PAR Utility Storage

Renowned Healthcare System Consolidates onto Tiered-Storage Platform in Open-PACS Deployment

FREMONT, CA — July 11, 2006

3PAR®, the leading provider of Utility Storage, announced today that Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA)—a nationally recognized, award-winning healthcare system—has implemented 3PAR Utility Storage to streamline its operations, reduce expenses, and alleviate the administrative burden of its ever-expanding digital imaging and record management systems. By choosing 3PAR Utility Storage with 3PAR Thin Provisioning, Dynamic Optimization and Remote Copy, CHA has drastically simplified its data storage environment, cut administrative time and capacity requirements in half, and implemented highly efficient and cost-effective disaster recovery.

"In the face of rapid growth and increasing user demand, 3PAR Utility Storage has enabled us to reduce our storage administration effort by 50% while cutting our capacity requirements in half with 3PAR Thin Provisioning," said Judy Klickstein, Chief Information Officer for Cambridge Health Alliance.

Serving the residents of Cambridge, Somerville, and Everett, Massachusetts and Boston's Metro-North region, CHA is comprised of three hospitals and more than 20 primary care practices. Nationally renowned for health care innovation and community excellence, CHA handles more than 16,000 in-patient and approximately 575,000 out-patient visits per year. At a time when health care is growing increasingly digital, CHA has experienced a rapid increase in its data storage needs--approximately 40% per year--as more images, patient records, test results, and patient monitoring functions are digitized.

Prior to consolidating with 3PAR, CHA's storage environment was becoming more and more difficult to manage as it tackled the challenges of digital healthcare, an expanding client base, and the growth of the CHA network through acquisitions. As CHA migrated its storage environment from predominantly direct-attached storage (DAS) to a storage area network (SAN)-based approach, some problems were alleviated while others persisted and new ones appeared.

CHA required a storage system that would be simple to manage, easy to use, scalable, and would afford the flexibility to be more responsive to client needs. CHA also needed a system that offered easy-to-use and cost-effective disaster recovery. After considering products from traditional SAN and NAS storage vendors and even the possibility of expanding an existing monolithic array, CHA identified 3PAR Utility Storage and the InServ® Storage Server as the single platform that would best meet all the organization's needs.

Since deploying the 3PAR InServ tiered-storage array with 3PAR Thin Provisioning and Dynamic Provisioning, CHA has seen dramatic results. "We face more storage demands every day," said CHA's Klickstein. "3PAR's simplicity and scalability lets us spend less time worrying about storage requirements. Instead we are much more customer-focused without associated cost premiums."

3PAR Thin Provisioning permits the one-time allocation of virtual capacity while consuming physical capacity for written data only. With Thin Provisioning, CHA has been able to do away with imprecise capacity estimations and upgrades in order to become more efficient and responsive to changes in its content management systems.

"3PAR has really led the charge with thin provisioning, one of the most useful storage system-based technologies that essentially eliminates stranded storage and greatly simplifies capacity planning," said Tony Asaro, senior analyst for the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). "We feel that as more companies get educated on the value of thin provisioning it will become a requisite feature."

In addition, CHA has achieved simply-managed tiered storage and disaster recovery with 3PAR Utility Storage. With the simple addition of affordable Nearline drives and 3PAR Dynamic Optimization software, the 3PAR tiered-storage array supports instant, same-system archiving. CHA uses 3PAR Virtual Copy to create space-efficient, daily snapshots for off-host backup and fast recovery.

CHA also purchased a second InServ for cost-effective disaster recovery over native-IP with 3PAR Remote Copy software. "Remote Copy is ridiculously simple and cost effective," said CHA's Klickstein. "No extra gear is required, and we can now deploy and administer robust disaster recovery ourselves."

"Cambridge Health Alliance exemplifies how 3PAR Utility Storage customers get so much from a single platform: cost-effective disaster recovery, automated tiered storage, simple one-time volume provisioning, a substantial reduction in administration efforts, 50% reduction in capacity requirements--the list goes on and on," said David Scott, President and CEO of 3PAR.

The 3PAR InServs at CHA support more than two hundred Microsoft Windows and Linux servers, many of which are virtual servers distributed across two Egenera® blade frames. Together, this solution handles all online data requirements for CHA including messaging, corporate applications, the Epic Systems ambulatory care product suite and Picture Archival Communication System (PACS) image databases.

To learn more about the 3PAR Utility Storage implementation at Cambridge Health Alliance, please attend a live SearchStorage.com Webcast on Wednesday, July 12 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Judith Klickstein, Senior Vice President Information Technology and Chief Information Officer, will discuss their move to Utility Storage in more detail.

About 3PAR
3PAR® (NYSE Arca: PAR) is the leading global provider of utility storage, a category of highly virtualized, tightly-clustered, and dynamically-tiered storage arrays built for utility computing. Organizations use utility computing to build cost-effective virtualized IT infrastructures for flexible workload consolidation. 3PAR Utility Storage gives customers an alternative to traditional arrays by delivering resilient infrastructure with increased agility at a lower total cost to meet their rapidly changing business needs. As a pioneer of thin provisioning — a green technology developed to address storage underutilization and inefficiencies — 3PAR offers products designed to minimize power consumption and promote environmental responsibility. With 3PAR, customers have reduced the costs of allocated storage capacity, administration, and SAN infrastructure while increasing adaptability and resiliency. 3PAR Utility Storage is built to meet the demands of open systems consolidation, integrated data lifecycle management, and performance-intensive applications.