St. John’s Riverside Hospital gains flexibility through HPE SimpliVity

St. John’s Riverside Hospital had been running their existing infrastructure environment for seven years, and the time had come for them to expand and update their technology. A multitude of issues came to a head, the most urgent being that their 40TB storage systems were quickly running out of physical space loads, restricting their ability to scale and grow. Their legacy servers were also oversubscribed to the point that failover was completely prohibited, leaving St. John’s Riverside Hospital in a compromised and unacceptable state if the system should ever crash. With so many mission-critical applications running in their virtualized environment, data protection and speedy data backup are essential to the well being of St. John’s Riverside and their patients. Using legacy backup software for their D2D backup as well as for an offsite location five miles away, St. John’s was seeing RPOs of eight to ten hours with a three-month retention and, depending on the data, RTOs could take five to ten minutes for files, with full servers taking up to 30 minutes. These backup times were unfavorable for St. John’s, who prides itself on continually improving efficiency and speed.

St. John’s Riverside Hospital has been a healthcare provider to the residents of the City of Yonkers and southern Westchester County in Greater New York City for almost 150 years. With a staff of 422 registered nurses that serves over 100,000 patient visits per year, St. John’s Riverside must ensure that its state-of-the-art medical technology always delivers outstanding and consistent service. A dedicated IT staff of 17 manages all of St. John’s mission-critical applications that range from the enterprise-standard Microsoft Office Suite, Citrix XenApp, MS Exchange, SFTP file server, Kronos, and Forward Advantage’s FormFast to health industry-specific applications such as SOS that provides electronic records for their nursing home, Pyxis, a medication inventory tracker, and McKesson PACS System that houses images for their radiology unit.