Recently, Pure Storage® SQL Server Architect Chris Adkin worked with Dr Foster, a subsidiary of Telstra Health, to advise the healthcare-analytics company on the benefits of using a Microsoft SQL Server 2019 Big Data Cluster to wrangle vast amounts of data in different datastores. Big Data Cluster is an ideal way to aggregate, analyze, and report on volumes of disparate data types in a timely and meaningful way while guarding patient privacy—a top priority in the highly regulated healthcare industry.
Together, SQL Server 2019 Big Data Cluster with Pure Storage FlashArray™ creates an affordable performance advantage.
“For a smaller organization like ours, it probably wouldn’t have been possible to achieve the benefits that we’ve gotten,” says George Bayliffe, head of data for Dr Foster, in a recent Microsoft case study. “We’d probably have had to resort to spinning disks for the less time-critical data.”
FlashArray storage, combined with SQL Server 2019 Big Data Cluster software, provides Dr Foster with a Modern Data Experience™, delivering breakthroughs in speed, simplicity, flexibility, and consolidation. The solution is ideal for departmental to large-scale enterprise shared-storage deployments, high performance, and mission-critical applications.
“Performance is up by an order of magnitude, and our Pure Storage array decreased storage costs significantly,” says Bayliffe. “We can now answer any need that comes up in the next three to four years.”
According to Bayliffe, core data-processing cycle times are 45% lower, which enables his team to save about two days of processing time in every run. Using Pure’s built-in compression, combined with indexing strategies that rely on columnstore indexes, has reduced the Dr Foster storage footprint by about 70% in terms of disk space. The added capacity and speed gained with these improvements has helped Dr Foster ramp up processing of COVID-19 test results that arrive from all over the UK. Patient level data is appended to the data store each morning, and is analyzed and reported on to provide results the same day.
Read the full Dr Foster Telstra Health story.
Learn more about Pure Storage SQL Server Solutions.
More on healthcare:
