Case Study

Caringo + Premier Physician Services

Steve Brown, Director of IT for Premier Physician Services and his team are responsible for implementing and maintaining the technology that enables 175 employees and more than 800 physicians and mid-level providers to have access to millions of medical records. Premier turned to Caringo object storage because, in providing emergency care services, there is little room for time-consuming pro-cesses like backups and even less room for errors.

The Challenge

Provide reliable storage for millions of medical document images

One of the services offered by Premier is a medical-document archiving solution that enables storage and access of medical charts used during the medical coding and billing process. Before turning to object storage, Premier utilized Networked

disaster recovery through full and incremental backups to tape. Because of the

Full backups would take four days to complete. This promoted a move to an objectstorage solution from another vendor. Premier was never fully satisfied with the solution, the level of support provided by the vendor or the ongoing maintenance costs, so when product support was dicontinued, Premier saw it as an opportunity to move to a solution that better suited its needs. The search led to Caringo.

“When evaluating CAStor, we developed programs to compare object retrieval -

cryption. We measured things like reads per second and bytes read per second. In all cases, Caringo performance matched or exceeded performance of the exist-ing system,” said Mr. Brown.

In addition to exceeding performance requirements, Caringo offered an open API that enabled integration into Premier’s in house developed document imaging solution and also worked seamlessly with its Storage Area Network enabled by Coraid, supporting the ATA over Ethernet (AoE) protocol.

Premier Physician Services Relies on Caringo to Provide Storage for Emergency Care Services

Challenge► Provide reliable storage for mil-

lions of medical document images with automated retention manage-ment that protects from failure and disaster

Solution► Premier implemented a combina-

tion of Caringo software, Coraid hardware, Eldos callback file sys-tem SDK and custom software

► Fault tolerant storage infrastruc-ture with automated retention management and 100 percent uptime

► Significant reduction in recurring costs with a 2X increase in stor-age capacity

► Attentive customer service

Application Areas► Active archive

► Business continuity and disaster recovery

► Healthcare

The Solution

The Benefits

A combination of Caringo software, Coraid hardware, Eldos callback

The production solution combines Caringo software, Coraid hardware, Eldos callback file system SDK and custom software. The specific Caringo products used areCAStor, Cluster Services Node and Content Router in a two-cluster configuration -

-

one for production and one for disaster recovery. There are two physical nodes per cluster running two virtual nodes each and two replicas of each image stored for a total of four replicas across the entire system (production and DR). The nodes are connected via Coraid’s AoE.

size of 130 KB. Retention periods are set by Premier’s imaging magement softwareThere are roughly 15 million images (TIFFs) currently stored with an average file

that adds encryption, file caching and secuirty. CAStor then automatically manages

“For Premier, immutable object storage with definable retention periods is the key

relatively simple setup, great support, the flexibility to use our own hardware, sim

production failure.” The price of the Caringo-based solution is significantly less on

Mr. Brown lists a number of benefits of the production solution, including “price,

file corruption instead of regular incremental backups,” said Mr. Brown.We rely on immutable object storage to protect against accidental file deletion and

the file retention period based on set policies.

-plicity of HTTP access and the ability to failover to the DR cluster in the event of a

an on-going basis with two times the amount of useable capacity when compared to prior solutions from another vendor. CAStor’s API also provided complete control allowing his team to improve security and performance while still achieving the data

traditional file system interface,” said Mr. Brown. “This made integration with our

integirty and disaster recovery features required.

“The CAStor API made it possible to develop a callback file system to provide a

encryption and file caching to further improve security and performance.”

without service disruption as a benfit. “We haven’t had any node failures, but

callback file system, we were also able to implement additional features such as filedocument imaging system almost completely transparent. Through this custom

Additionally, Mr. Brown mentioned CAStor’s ability to gracefully manage disk failure

we’ve had a disk failure. When this occurred, CAStor responded by automatically creating additional replicas on other drives. We were able to replace the failed drive and then CAStor rebalanced the replicas across all drives.”

any platform, significantly reducing storage costs and operational resources. Caringo

About Caringo

100 percent uptime and a significant reduction in recurring costs

Caringo develops a complete software cloud storage infrastructure and service enable-ment stack that supports any capacity, any number of tenants and provides access from

innovatively provides S3-like storage in a symmetric architecture with elastic content

in your datacenter. The result is a unified pool of storage that boots from bare metalprotection, intelligent content distribution and centralized management fast and secure

and can seamlessly scale from terabytes to exabytes delivering cloud economics to any content storage including cloud storage, big data storage, active archives or as general storage infrastructure.

Caringo and CAStor are registered trademarks of Caringo Inc. in the United States. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners.. © 2013 Caringo, Inc. All rights reserved.

“For us, immutable object

storage with definable reten-

tion periods is the key. We rely

on immutable object storage

to protect against accidental

file deletionand file corruption

instead of regular incremental

backups.”

Steve BrownDirector of ITPremier Physician Services

8/13

Learn MoreTo learn more about Premier Physician Services visit www.premierdocs.com.

To learn more about Caringo and our products visit our website or e-mail info@caringo.com.

Caringo, Inc.6801 North Capital of Texas HighwayBuilding 2, Suite 200Austin, Texas 78731512.782.4490

www.caringo.com