University of Colorado School of Dental Medicine upgrades service to 65,000 patients

The University of Colorado School of Dental Medicine (SDM) in Denver is one of the six schools that comprise the university’s Anschutz Medical Campus. But the School of Dental Medicine is unique in that it is the only one of the six schools that serves actual patients, providing low-cost dental services to 65,000 patients last year at the on-campus dental clinic.

When the clinic opens every day at 9:00am, front desk employees check in up to 300 patients simultaneously. The SDM was experiencing its own unique type of boot storm, with inadequate IOPS to handle the load and register that many patients simultaneously, frustrating the front desk staff with intolerable waits for patient records.

According to Jaymil Patel, Director of Information Services at UC’s SDM, “We are the only building on campus that has actual patients come in the door. We have hundreds of patients every day so we have the task of not only being a school, but a business. The pressure on us is a lot higher. If the other schools have an IT problem, students might not be able to take a test. But if we have a problem we have actual patients in dental chairs all day long and we can’t function.”

An engineer from Citrix evaluated the school’s infrastructure and confirmed the IOPS problem with the Dell storage. He recommended that SDM look at hybrid solid state-hard disk drive storage solutions. The SDM team initiated the research and evaluation process after identifying four important criteria for a new storage system: high IOPS, low latency, multi-protocol and built-in data reduction. After evaluating products from Tegile, Nimble Storage and Whiptail, the school picked Tegile as the clear winner.

“When we compared the price and the functionality we were looking for, Tegile was the winner because it does everything we wanted,” said Patel. “The hybrid model that Tegile presented was really attractive to us. Compression and data deduplication were big factors for us and Tegile was the only one with both to significantly save capacity.”

The school installed a Tegile Zebi HA2100EP array and J1100 expansion array last August and added a J2100 expansion array in January with an additional 26 TB of storage capacity.

According to Rob Commins, Vice President of Marketing at Tegile, “Our Zebi arrays win ‘hands down’ when users are looking for high IOPS, low latency, functionality, multi-protocol and built-in data reduction. Fitting into the university’s budget, while taking the frustration out of the equation for the staff who were living with intolerable waits for patient records, and making the patient experience a good one, is exactly what our Zebi hybrid arrays are designed to do.”

According to Patel, “In the past, if all 300-plus chairs were refreshing the status, everything was so slow, but now we don’t even realize that this issue exists. It’s just phenomenal for everybody. You can imagine at 9 o’clock we check in more than 300 patients, so all of them are refreshed every 30 seconds and we don't see any latency, no issues, nothing.”

Tegile, which has significant market share with universities, is helping colleges and universities protect their strained IT budgets while boosting their scholarship funds with its new “Don’t Overpay for Storage” promotion. Under the program, Tegile will contribute $2,500 to a college’s scholarship fund for every Zebi hybrid array purchased through June 30, 2013.