St George's Hospital, Christchurch.
Christchurch's St George’s Hospital has deployed systems from Pure Storage to ensure high-speed access to critical information.
The charitable hospital’s IT team embarked on a digital transformation programme in 2020 to address significant mission-critical data management challenges that emerged during the COVID19 pandemic and an expansion in the volume and complexity of that data.
Established in the early 1920s and opened in 1928, St George’s is one of the largest private hospitals in New Zealand. It invested heavily in technology and innovation to position itself at the forefront of medical service delivery.
The surgical department was moving patients’ paper clinical records to new digital medical records and the Cancer Care Centre’s use of high-resolution images in treatment plans resulted in a much larger data footprint.
A strategic review also found there was an opportunity to migrate from traditional paper-based records to a digital platform.
However, St George’s legacy storage environment was struggling to meet growing capacity needs. An end-of-life storage environment was causing speed and performance issues and the hospital's digital transformation plans required greater scalability. Concerns around cyber security were also increasing.
The hospital needed a new storage environment to help it deliver state-of-the-art services.
“We reassessed the hospital’s storage requirements and considered our future needs," said Fenton Kitchen, the hospital's chief digital officer. "We concluded we needed to migrate to a faster and more efficient storage cluster, and we selected Pure Storage’s FlashArray//X to accelerate our core applications."
The shift provided St George's with greater capacity and performance with lower risk, he said.
"We worry less about security risk and cyber threats knowing we have a secure platform that is optimised and up to date.”
Kitchen said the system helped the hospital deliver superior patient care through fast and reliable system access, maintains high resiliency to keep systems running during possible natural disasters, and provided the storage scalability needed to support digital transformation.
“We wanted to get the new Pure Storage system implemented quickly as our storage needed to be ready to take on extra workload during the height of the pandemic,” he said.
The hospital’s IT team were able to deploy quickly with remote support from the Pure Storage team. Once the hardware was delivered onsite at St George’s, the Pure arrays were up in under six hours.
The deployment is supported by real-time monitoring and updates from a cloud-based management platform, promising a potential data reduction ratio of 3 to 1.
The hospital also selected Pure Storage 's Evergreen storage model to enable IT staff to rapidly expand storage as needed. Since moving, the hospital had not only increased storage capacity, but also gained significant speed and smoother integration with its VMware environment.
The stability of SQL connections for applications had improved and backups and snapshots were significantly faster as well.
The St George’s team also implemented ActiveCluster and advanced data protection measures that help maintain availability and deliver high resiliency in the face of unforeseen events.
"Undertaking a digital transformation project during the pandemic was extremely brave of the St George’s IT team and Pure Storage was proud to be able to help them pull it off smoothly with our uncomplicated but powerful modern data solutions,” said Pure Storage NZ's managing director, Stuart Blythe.
As reported last month, Pure Storage is pursuing a storage as a service strategy, allowing its partners to build annuity revenue.
