A high-performance Epic electronic health record (EHR) infrastructure solution at Sirius client UF Health Shands Hospital is the focus of a new IBM case study.
Shands Hospital is the teaching hospital for the University of Florida (UF). Approximately 1,300 UF College of Medicine faculty and community physicians—working with approximately 12,000 UF Health Shands and UF Health Jacksonville employees—contribute to the health system’s excellent reputation for quality care and service.
UF Health Shands Hospital chose to deploy four IBM FlashSystem V840 storage devices, which are virtualized using IBM Spectrum Virtualize. Sirius, an IBM Premier Business Partner, provided support during the implementation.
Two FlashSystems are deployed in the primary data center in Gainesville, supporting the Epic production database and a local read-only copy. The two flash arrays are mirror copies of each other to provide an extra level of transparent redundancy. The third FlashSystem, located at a remote site in Jacksonville, contains both the DR and another read-only copy of Epic. The fourth FlashSystem, housed in an alternate data center located on campus, supports analytics and executive reporting.
Using the built-in IBM Real-time Compression capabilities of the FlashSystem V840, UF Health Shands Hospital was able to reduce the size of its Epic database by 61 percent, freeing up space and reducing the need to invest in additional capacity for future Epic upgrades.
Switching to FlashSystem has also accelerated the runtime of Epic integrity checks; what used to take 60 hours now completes in just two hours—a 97 percent improvement. Equally, system I/O response times have fallen from around 6 ms/operation to significantly less than 1 ms/operation.
To ensure rapid backups that minimize impact on the production landscape, UF Health Shands Hospital deployed two IBM Storwize V7000 storage devices, which are also virtualized using IBM Spectrum Virtualize.
In addition, UF Health Shands Hospital has deployed two additional Storwize V7000 systems to store its VMware virtual machine landscape.
The production environment for Epic at UF Health Shands Hospital is running on two IBM Power Systems S824 servers in a cluster configuration at the primary data center in Gainesville, with an additional S824 deployed in Jacksonville supporting the failover environment. IBM Power 750 Express servers support the read-only instances of Epic both in Gainesville and Jacksonville.
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