Proliance Surgeons cuts PACS image costs by 50% and reclaims over 100 staff hours per year

The Challenge

Proliance operated HPE ProLiant Gen 10 servers with HPE Nimble Storage for primary storage and relied on disparate, legacy point products for backups and file storage—including Synology and Dell EqualLogic—that required a dedicated engineer to identify failures, replace parts, and ensure clusters were fixed. As the organization’s existing products reached “end of life,” IT recognized an opportunity to move to a modern data management solution that was more cost efficient and could do more with data including intelligent analytics and monitoring. Leadership also wanted a solution that would allow Proliance to optimize picture archiving and communication system (PACS) workloads, ensuring only what was needed was running on more costly primary storage.

“We had one engineer performing all of these unnecessary, manual tasks that took time about every two weeks and created anxiety until they were resolved,” remembers Curt Kwak, CIO at Proliance Surgeons. “We began to look for a new backup solution, and evaluated a host of options for several months before moving into pilots with both Cohesity and Rubrik.”

Although the team was impressed by both solutions initially, Proliance discovered during product demonstrations that only the Cohesity-HPE solution provided a robust, combination backup and files solution. Proliance chose the integrated HPE-Cohesity solution because of its consolidated, single platform with the ability to support multiple data management use cases—including backups, archives, file shares, object stores and data used in analytics and dev/ test. Proliance aims to implement the full solution in the near future, including its snapshot integration with HPE Nimble storage for more efficient backup and recovery.

The Solution

The single, hyperscale Cohesity-HPE platform was intuitive to implement and the healthcare IT team sought best-practices guidance from Cohesity experts during deployment. Today, Proliance runs Cohesity’s rich product functionality on HPE servers to backup and retain approximately 800 TBs of data in its data center. The healthcare organization, which has virtualized approximately 90% of its workloads with VMware, eliminated failures and simplified data protection with Cohesity. Proliance also expects to roll out Cohesity cloud archival functionality for edge locations soon.

The healthcare company also leverages Cohesity SmartFiles for file and object services. Heavy users of Microsoft SQL, Proliance used to have to send images from its PACS to Nimble Storage during the many spinning-disk failures of its previous solution. Now, IT simply and reliably diverts PACS images for modalities such as X-rays, MRIs, and CT scans to Cohesity for more cost-efficient data management.

“Cohesity is ideal for PACS image files and because of its efficiency, there’s less disruption on the utilization of our electronic health record (EHR) system and improved data availability, too,” said Kwak.

The healthcare provider anticipates the Cohesity-HPE solution will also be more efficient for other ultra-high-definition images, such as videos, as capacity needs scale.

The Results

Software-defined Cohesity on HPE servers enabled Proliance to replace legacy IT backup and files solutions, reducing hardware and space requirements equal to one full data center rack as well as associated real estate investments. Moreover, the reliable HPE–Cohesity solution has eliminated the inefficient, manual troubleshooting tasks consuming IT staff resources.

Today, not just one dedicated engineer, but all Proliance system administrators can use the smart, integrated system to proactively monitor the entire enterprise and focus on architecting for further innovation. “We are experiencing both time and cost savings with the Cohesity-HPE solution because we now rely on one data management platform for backup, archiving, long-term retention, and files. It’s always working and not just one specialist, but our whole team can take advantage of its modern capabilities,” Kwak adds.

“Cohesity is a functionally rich solution and it’s constantly being updated with advancements, and I believe that we are just scratching the surface of what it can do,” says Kwak. “The cloud capabilities are very interesting to us as we consider how to achieve our 60:40 percent vision of applications on-premises versus in the cloud.”