When it comes to managing vast amounts of unstructured healthcare data, hospitals and healthcare providers have a particularly daunting challenge given the pace at which new digital tools and innovations are transforming patient care. According to a recent study by IDC *, 270 GB of healthcare data was created for every person in the world last year.
Hospital systems are now tasked with creating, managing and storing vast numbers of CT scans, MRIs, X-Rays reports, and other medical test results and images for their patients. They need to make these highly sensitive files available to providers in real time so important treatment decisions can be made based on them. Any latency in these systems can lead to frustrating and even dangerous delays for physicians and other medical team members.
Qumulo recently sat down with Chris Painter of the Virginia-based healthcare organization Carilion Clinic, one of our numerous healthcare customers, to hear more about how his team is tackling these sorts of challenges. Carilion Clinic runs a comprehensive network of hospitals, primary and specialty physician practices, and complementary services that serve close to 1 million Virginians. Chris is a senior level storage engineer in the technology services department there.
Qumulo (Q): How much healthcare data is your team currently managing?
Chris Painter (CP): We manage 8 petabytes of storage using technology from Qumulo, Pure, Hitachi, and Rubrik for backup and recovery.Q: Tell us a bit more about the overall challenges your team was facing.
CP: All of these new solutions put us leaps ahead of where we were previously in terms of technology. However, we were still faced with NAS migrations which involve a lot of overhead. There are a lot of resources required to get those things done.Q: How did you find and select Qumulo for your file data management needs?
CP: I was searching for a product that we could scale and continue to improve upon as that technology grew. We wanted to get away from having to do a full NAS migration every three years. In an effort to put an end to that madness, we went with Qumulo and felt it could address that issue. The other thing we saw in Qumulo versus other products is that it was straightforward, simple, and easy to use. It has great feature sets. It addressed our primary requirements which were basically performance and reliability. Those are huge for us in the medical field. My feeling is that Qumulo has allowed us to get back some additional cycles that we were unable to get back with the running of other systems or other NAS systems that required more hands-on (management).Q: How do you find Qumulo’s customer support?
CP: The other thing that I really do love about Qumulo is the support. The support is probably the best support team that I’ve ever worked with throughout my history with Carilion. I love the Slack channel. It’s easy to communicate a problem, and it’s instant. So we do love the product.Q: Thank you for your time and input. We really appreciate it. * IDC estimates that on average, approximately 270 GB of life sciences and healthcare data will be created for every person in the world in 2020.