FirstHealth replaced its antiquated direct-attached storage (DAS) infrastructure with a flexible, scalable, and easy-to-manage infrastructure that has reduced management and production costs. The new NetApp system enables FirstHealth to quickly put clinical information into the hands of caregivers, resulting in better patient care, shorter hospital stays, and monumental cost savings for both the hospital network and the community it serves.

"The NetApp unified storage architecture has given FirstHealth the flexibility to match our storage to multiple applications, user access, and archive requirements without worrying about being locked into a specific platform or configuration," said Dave Dillehunt, chief information officer at FirstHealth. "Standardizing on NetApp dramatically improved our ability to manage information assets, and the faster we can put critical patient data into a physician's hands, the faster the diagnosis and treatment of the patient."

Primary storage from NetApp FAS3000 series systems provides round-the-clock global data availability for the full suite of FirstHealth information and application environments, including fileshares, home directories, and Oracle® Database applications. FirstHealth leverages NetApp Data ONTAP® 7G and the functionality of FlexVol® to dynamically provision and allocate more than 150TB of data storage resources as needed to quickly respond to the massive data growth and changing application user environments. NetApp NearStore systems enable high-speed disk-to-disk backup and serve as a permanent archive for PACS (picture archiving and communication system) images and electronic medical records. Integrity of critical patient data is secured by NetApp SnapMirror® and NetApp Snapshot™ technology to facilitate automated replication of all business- and patient-critical data among the FirstHealth hospitals. Additionally, NetApp SnapRestore® software enables virtually instantaneous recovery of a single file or multi-terabyte volumes. The comprehensive data protection suite from NetApp gives FirstHealth tremendous data availability and recoverability and helps ensure that its hospitals can deliver critical care, even in the event of a site disaster.

"NetApp primary and secondary storage solutions have solved the infrastructure and regulatory demands of one of the leading health-care networks in the Carolinas," said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions Marketing at Network Appliance. "NetApp is proud to partner with FirstHealth to provide significant cost savings, scalability, disaster recovery, and unprecedented infrastructure flexibility for a health network experiencing 100 percent data growth year over year. Together with FirstHealth, we are working to provide patients with the best health care possible" - Network Appliance.