Cancer Treatment Centers of America

cu stom e r p r of i le
Cancer Treatment Centers
of America
EMC’s most powerful, high-capacity midrange
system and advanced data protection software
support critical oncology environment
For over 20 years Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA) has had one goal: to help people win
the battle over cancer. Specializing in advanced stage 3 and 4 cancers, as well as complex cases
where other health issues may be involved, this growing network of world-class cancer treatment
hospitals and facilities throughout the U.S. delivers an integrative, whole-person approach to care
that draws from leading-edge research and a comprehensive range of advanced therapies and
techniques.
To better support fast, around-the-clock access to patient-critical information, CTCA is in the process
of rolling out a major electronic health record (EHR) initiative based on applications from Eclipsys
­Corporation, a leading provider of information solutions for the healthcare industry.
The implementation encompasses over 300 servers and 96 different databases supported by
two mirrored EMC® CLARiiON® CX3-80 UltraScale™ series storage systems—a platform certified by
Eclipsys for use with its applications. In addition, the performance, capacity, and high reliability of
CTCA’s new EMC CLARiiON CX3-80 networked storage will be leveraged to support other key applications such as Misys radiology and laboratory solutions as well as Microsoft CRM and Exchange environments. State-of-the-art EMC storage management, backup, and recovery applications are also part
of this comprehensive solution and help facilitate an optimized, highly available storage environment.
“One of the critical components to providing unsurpassed care is enabling our physicians and clinicians to access the information they need whenever and wherever they need it,” says Chad Eckes,
CIO. “This is one of the key reasons why replacing our direct-attached storage-to-server environment
with EMC’s centralized storage infrastructure was so important.”
The power, capacity, and flexibility to support demanding
EHR applications
Over the last 20 months, CTCA’s storage demands have grown upwards to 125 percent. That figure
is expected to continue to rise as the organization transitions over to its new EHR environment.
­Presently, 60 percent of CTCA’s medical records are in paper format.
“In the future we will be paperless,” says Eckes. “At the entry point of our hospital system process
we will have high-volume scanners to turn the hard-copy files of approximately 3,200 new patients a
year into imaged, online records. New records and information will be added to the electronic patient
folder as they are generated.”
With the capability to deliver end-to-end four gigabytes/second bandwidth and scalability up to
237 terabytes, the EMC CLARiiON CX3-80 platform positions CTCA to fully accommodate its new EHR
initiative as well as address growing storage demands throughout the organization for years to come.
Within this centralized storage environment, EMC Navisphere® management software has been
implemented to support comprehensive management of the organization’s CLARiiON CX3 seriesbased SAN.
“Our vision is to use Navisphere as a complete management suite that enables my staff to configure,
provision, and monitor CLARiiON networked storage systems from a single console,” says Rakesh
Patel, Director of Infrastructure and Security. “The use of Navisphere Analyzer to collect performance
information in graphical form will help us identify performance patterns and trends before problems
occur. We see Navisphere being used like a dashboard where you can see at-a-glance any threshold
or capacity issues.”
“In an environment where we pride ourselves on going above
and beyond in providing world-class care, we expect the same
level of service from anybody who deals with us from a vendor
standpoint. That’s where EMC and its products shine.”
Chad Eckes, CIO
Coinciding with the Eclipsys EHR initiative, an information lifecycle management strategy is being
formulated, which will be supported by EMC CLARiiON CX series technology. The ability to take
advantage of either high-speed Fibre Channel or more economical, high-capacity ATA drives within
the same EMC CLARiiON system provides the organization with the flexibility to effectively and costefficiently meet various application service-level needs.
“By migrating to a solution such as Eclipsys, we’ve put best practices in place in terms of having formalized environments for production, development, training, and so forth,” says Eckes. “We expect
to have a total of six environments full of data that we’ll have to manage on an ongoing basis. With
only one, maybe two of those environments requiring Fibre Channel performance, it’s nice to have
the option to use less-expensive ATA drives for the rest, and still benefit from continuous availability
with either option.”
EMC business continuity solutions streamline backup and recovery
for improved uptime
Until recently, backup and recovery at CTCA was a time-consuming, manual process involving backup
tapes and offsite storage. In addition, with only one data center located within the organization’s
corporate offices, outside contracts were necessary to deliver hardware and backup tapes to a rented
space in a shared data center in the event of a disaster.
While tape copies will still be made and stored offsite for backup archive purposes, EMC’s fast, reliable, and highly automated online backup and disaster recovery solutions will replace the existing
backup and recovery environment allowing for extensive local and remote recovery capabilities.
Support for centralized backup to disk for CTCA’s entire production environment will be accommodated by integrating the automated, advanced features of EMC NetWorker® backup and recovery
software with a cost-efficient, highly reliable EMC Disk Library system capable of scaling up to one
petabyte of compressed usable capacity.
In addition, EMC SnapView™ software helps the organization address the challenge of deploying
major upgrades to production systems, and facilitates their recovery if a major upgrade fails.
“SnapView allows us to create, in background mode, a mountable snapshot or full copy of production
data,” says Patel. “The process is handled on the CLARiiON CX3-80 array, so there is no performance
degradation on any attached servers. The process is transparent to the primary server, yet the resulting data is available to any server.”
Cutting-edge EMC MirrorView™ software will be used to synchronously replicate data between the
EMC CLARiiON CX3-80 system in CTCA’s corporate office and a second CLARiiON CX3-80 system
located at the organization’s new disaster recovery data center 40 miles away.
“MirrorView provides a disaster recovery solution that protects our most critical data in the event
of a catastrophic outage,” says Patel. “If our production site becomes unavailable, we can run the
applications 100 percent from the disaster recovery site.”
“By keeping a few weeks of local backups online, our users will now be able to quickly and easily
recover files themselves,” adds Eckes. “As far as disaster recovery goes, having that remote information accessible and up to date within a 15-minute window allows us to feel assured that no matter
what, patient care will not be impacted.”
Early benefits of VMware technology adoption
In the early stages of adoption, VMware® server virtualization technology is currently being used to
test systems before rollout to CTCA’s production environment. Eventually, the plan is to use VMware
technology to consolidate CTCA’s existing physical server environment. By creating many virtualized
servers to accommodate the organization’s many clinical and business applications within a few
larger physical servers, the server footprint within the main data center will be significantly reduced.
“Within the last 18 months our server count has tripled and we are running out of space,” says
Eckes. “By using VMware to consolidate our server environment we expect to see immediate cost
advantages in terms of space, power, and cooling. We expect hardware acquisition costs to drop as
well. Management will also be easier because there will be fewer servers to oversee.”
High expectations for the information infrastructure
With full rollout expected to be completed within the next several months, CTCA has high expectations for the organization’s new EMC information infrastructure integrated with the Eclipsys EHR
environment. The ability to effectively and cost-efficiently manage all of the data generated by this
new environment, quick and reliable access to current and historical data at the point of care, and
the security provided by redundant data sets, are all anticipated to help CTCA further its efforts in
carrying out a patient-care model that is second to none.
“In an environment where we pride ourselves on going above and beyond in providing world-class
care, we expect the same level of service from anybody who deals with us from a vendor standpoint,”
says Eckes. “That’s where EMC and its products shine.”
EMC Corporation
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Massachusetts
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www.EMC.com
EMC2, EMC, CLARiiON, Navisphere, NetWorker, and where information lives are registered trademarks and MirrorView, SnapView, and UltraScale are trademarks of EMC Corporation. VMware is a registered trademark of VMware, Inc.
All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners. © Copyright 2008 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Published in the USA. 02/08 H4167