Datrium Improves Disaster Recovery Time and Performance of Epic Environment for Northwest Community Healthcare

Datrium today announced that award winning hospital, Northwest Community Healthcare (NCH), has selected Datrium’s Automatrix platform to deliver improved performance for its Epic electronic health record system while also advancing business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities. NCH chose the Datrium platform for its ability to address various shortcomings associated with their current infrastructure deployment – recovery times, disaster recovery, site diversity, application performance, and security – while minimizing IT spending. Since implementing Datrium, NCH has experienced 78% faster performance and achieved 97% faster RTO with a recovery time of 15 minutes instead of 8 hours. The healthcare provider also saw improvements in app response time performance and Epic exception flags as well as a reduction in infrastructure costs, better regulatory compliance with blanket encryption and mitigated business risk with an active disaster recovery data center. 

For the IT team at NCH, availability, performance and security of their roughly 1,100 virtual machine infrastructure is mission critical. NCH has 3,800 healthcare employees that count on their system, Epic, to deliver information at the point of care. The Epic environment represents roughly 20% of NCH’s overall virtualized environment and is critical in the 24x7x365 delivery of care to the community they serve. When their existing aging infrastructure needed a refresh due to an existing environment that consisted of a variety of solutions from different IT vendors (i.e., Cisco, HP, Nutanix, Hitachi, Dell, EMC and VCE), the IT team established a set of acquisition criteria for the new infrastructure and explored the capabilities of the Datrium Automatrix platform. It also represented an opportunity to address improvements in a variety of its key infrastructure attributes.

“Datrium took the time to understand our unique environment and create an optimized solution that came in more than $1.5M below other leading vendor offerings while saving our IT staff valuable management time and reducing overall business risk,” said Glen Malan, CIO, Northwest Community Healthcare.

NCH Achieves Improved Performance with Less Infrastructure While Doing More with a Limited IT Staff

Like many organizations NCH is challenged with a limited IT budget and staff. In Datrium, NCH found an effective technology solution allowing the company to capture the greatest value from every IT dollar they spend. Automatrix’s simplified VM-centric management and independent, granular scaling of performance and capacity have driven substantial improvements in IT productivity. Now the IT staff can be more efficient and have time for more strategic projects that improve the quality of care at NCH.

Prior to Datrium, NCH had an exception flag percentage of 1 in 98 users having greater than a five second wait. After implementing Datrium, NCH saw this improve to 1 in 434 users which represents a 77% improvement. Further, after migrating 96% of Tier 0-2 VMs to Datrium, end user’s average response time reduced by 39% enabling them to respond faster to patients. Ninety percent of Epic virtual machines running on Automatrix saw read performance drop from 3-4 milliseconds to less than 1 millisecond. IOPS also improved 4.5x even though the infrastructure footprint was much smaller in the data center.

With Datrium, NCH decreased the amount of IT equipment to just a fraction of its previous infrastructure deployment which also resulted in a 44% decrease in IT costs. With the savings, NCH was able to fund and implement additional incremental strategic IT projects such as a high profile NSX micro-segmentation project to help NCH meet and exceed demanding security and regulatory requirements and the delivery of enhanced data center resiliency and disaster recovery to a secondary active data center to ensure critical healthcare services can still be provided in the case of an emergency.

“Datrium improving the exception flags in our Epic system were the most impressive results. And furthermore, with the cost savings, we significantly improved our IT infrastructure in terms of security and resiliency,” said Malan. “We were able to deliver an order of magnitude lower risk to the NCH community thanks to Datrium Automatrix.”

Recovery in Minutes Rather Than Hours

Datrium’s built-in, verified backup, secondary site replication, and failproof disaster recovery helped to advance NCH’s company data protection and business continuity strategies. Further, the deployment helped NCH dramatically improve RPO by more than 90%. Key facilitators of their business continuity improvements are enabled via Datrium’s elastic replication and runbook driven site failover capabilities. With Datrium, NCH can also take advantage of quick recovery and failover to a secondary site, a significant capability advancement for the organization.

Mitigating Risk and Improving Compliance

Moving from one primary data center to two active-active data centers has significantly reduced the risk profile at NCH.Datrium’s Automatrix Blanket Encryption has improved the security of data end-to-end at NCH allowing the organization to meet and exceed healthcare regulatory compliance as well as reduce the risk of data breaches. Since the Automatrix recovery points can extend back months and years, data recovery from ransomware attacks can be easily mitigated and addressed.

“In less than a year we replaced our entire server and storage platform across the board, performed a double Epic upgrade, opened multiple new major healthcare facilities, and as of today we are running Epic in our DR facility that didn’t have a single server a year ago. I’m humbled and proud of the work we completed with the Datrium team,” concluded Malan.

“NCH’s choice of Datrium is a testament to the breadth and flexibility of the Automatrix platform. IT and business leaders at NCH can now sleep better at night knowing that they can provide world class healthcare to their community even when disasters strike,” said Tim Page, Datrium CEO. “We’re honored to be the trusted advisor and multicloud data platform for healthcare organizations such as NCH who are continually innovating to bring the best available services, providers and technology to the communities it serves.”