The Performance Challenges

Community Medical Center (CMC) had one initial requirement – find a FAL remediation solution for their MEDITECH electronic health record (EHR) application to maintain 24/7 availability and avoid downtime. What surprised them the most was the extent of the performance boost from using DymaxIO™ I/O transformation software.

“Our doctors and clinicians were losing too much time on basic tasks like waiting on medical images to load, or scanning images, or even just navigating from screen to screen within the application. The easy answer is to buy new server and storage hardware; however, that’s also a very expensive answer. When you’re a small hospital, you need to squeeze every last drop of performance out of your existing infrastructure. Since we don’t have the budget luxury of doing hardware refreshes every three years, we need to get at least five years or more from our storage backend,” said IT Director at Community Medical Center.

The Performance Benefits

The IT Director continued, “We initially purchased DymaxIO I/O transformation software to meet an availability requirement, but what surprised us the most was how much value it to added to our aging storage infrastructure by offloading a significant amount of I/O traffic. Not only did we get an immediate performance boost for MEDITECH, but we soon realized that we needed to try DymaxIO on our other Tier-1 applications like NextGen, MS-SQL, MS Exchange, Citrix XenApp, and others.”

The IT Director identified 35 key virtual servers that ran an assortment of different applications, like NextGen EHR (supported by a MS-SQL database), MS Exchange, Citrix XenApp, GE Centricity Perinatal, and others. In aggregate, DymaxIO offloaded 43% of all read traffic from storage and 29% of write traffic. With well over half a billion I/Os eliminated from going to storage, the median latency savings meant an aggregate of 157 days of cumulative storage I/O time saved across all the servers over a three-month period. When examining the last 24 hours from CMC’s single heaviest workload on a MS-SQL server, DymaxIO offloaded 48,272,115 I/O operations from storage (48% of read traffic / 47% of write traffic) – a savings of seven hours in storage I/O time

“There’s no way we would have achieved a 5-year lifecycle on our storage system without DymaxIO offloading so much I/O traffic from that subsystem. We had no idea how many I/O operations from virtual server to storage were essentially wasted activity due to Windows write inefficiencies chewing up IOPS or hot data that is more effectively served from available DRAM,” said the IT Director.

The Full Story

To read the full story on how DymaxIO I/O transformation software boosted their EHR and MS-SQL performance, read here: Community Medical Center Case Study