We deliver the cure for managing infrastructure pain.

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1 CUSTOMER CASE STUDY We deliver the cure for managing infrastructure pain. Being a technology shop touting cutting-edge software platforms, we wanted to have cutting-edge infrastructure. SolidFire offered us that. Edward Dibeler AHCS Chief Information Officer Be fueled by SolidFire. Do what s never been done.

2 Automated HealthCare Solutions (AHCS) and its sister company, LLC offer next generation technology platforms that drive how physicians manage dispensing and inventory, automated claims, and customer relationships. Their solutions integrate seamlessly into existing physician and administrative staff workflows, allowing doctors and hospitals to provide care rather than focusing on billing, accounts payable, and back-end IT. How changed insurance verification in real time One significant and problematic obstacle to providing care is often insurance verification. Dr. Gerald Glass, AHCS co-founder, recognized this need and launched a real-time, high-performance enterprise application to verify insurance in an instant. Application performance and uptime are critical to achieving this goal. Yet cloud solutions from thirdparty service providers and internal legacy systems all struggled to deliver the adequate application performance required. AHCS and s innovative solutions required a scale-out storage architecture that matched their platform s demands. The platform had to query multiple databases contained in a private cloud and enable electronic rapid health care benefit verification to over 10,000 insurance carriers in less than six seconds per patient. So AHCS turned to a cutting-edge solution to power its next generation infrastructure. What this means to s customers We had to look at a solution that would give us everything. It wasn t until we did our homework on SolidFire that we realized this is the solution that will take us to the next generation. is being used by providers, hospitals, institutions, and even insurance companies themselves. All users are eager to achieve the same end result: patients getting the care they need without needless wait times. You re a patient, you re in pain, you re in front of your doctor. The doctor or clinician is trying to pull you up in a system being used by more than 2,000 doctors. Performance is pretty important, said Eugenio Escanaverino, AHCS Chief Technology Officer. Dr. Gerald Glass AHCS Co-Founder 2

3 The Whole Story As a practicing physician, Dr. Glass noticed that doctors, providers, and hospitals had difficulties applying technology in ways that could help them focus more on practicing medicine. He founded AHCS in 1998 with Dr. Paul Zimmerman to overcome this problem. Then in 2010, Dr. Glass recognized an adjacent need for real-time insurance benefit verification, which prompted the formation of. SolidFire offered the ability to scale and add horsepower at the same time and the ability to add nodes without having downtime or affecting production. Edward Dibeler AHCS Chief Information Officer Both AHCS and required a storage infrastructure that delivered predictable performance without a traditional scale-up, controller-plus-shelf configuration. You have these really expensive controllers that really don t offer any horsepower for what you are trying to push out, Edward said. And, due to the sensitivity of the information and the services that we provide, deep system monitoring, the ability to upgrade on the fly, encryption and strong data protection were also critical, Edward said. Predictable performance enables consolidation SolidFire s all-flash architecture and guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS) was a big plus for AHCS because of its enterprise-wide agile development methodology. Guaranteed QoS enabled AHCS to consolidate its MS SQL databases, user-acceptance environment, pre-production, production, demo, and staging environments onto a single SolidFire cluster. was introduced to SolidFire in We were talking around the idea of looking for better ways to store our data. We looked at a wide array of the old-school stuff that s out there. We looked at it and just were not happy with the way that it was built, configured, designed, and managed, Edward said. By consolidating its environments, AHCS also benefits from SolidFire s always-on in-line deduplication. Deduping is huge for us because as a dev shop we have lots of copies of the same thing, Edward said. It saves us tremendously on storage. 3

4 Data security Because both AHCS and are sold into the health care industry, they have strict rules for ensuring data security requirements (such as HIPPA) are met. SolidFire supports drive-level encryption at rest on all storage nodes, providing the data security AHCS needs. Just the speed of being able to bring up a VM or stage a new server in VM is right now one of our most favorite features. Eugenio Escanaverino AHCS Chief Technology Officer Storage that scales non-disruptively One of AHCS s most critical requirements was storage that could scale without downtime. SolidFire s scale-out architecture and completely non-disruptive hardware and software upgrades alleviated the headaches AHCS had around maintenance windows. We re encrypting at rest, which is big as a health care shop. It also protects our IP as we re writing code. That s very valuable to us, Edward said. VMware integration AHCS and have virtualized their environment using VMware. SolidFire s integrations with VMware, including a vsphere Client and vcenter Client plugins, have helped AHCS accelerate its infrastructure deployment. Just the speed of being able to bring up a VM or stage a new server in VM is right now one of our most favorite features, Eugenio said. AHCS recently bought a backup solution that works through vsphere and vcenter. It allows us to deploy VMs directly to SolidFire. We re really building a robust infrastructure around the SolidFire platform, Edward said. SolidFire offered the ability to scale and add horsepower at the same time, the ability to add nodes without having downtime, without affecting production, Edward said. As we ve expanded our array, we like the fact that we can have multiple nodes go down at the same time and not only have zero impact on performance, but zero data loss and zero impact on performance on rebuild. That s really big for us. 4

5 Business Results Because of SolidFire s all-flash design, QoS, and non-disruptive upgrades, AHCS and have seen immediate business results. On our production side, we ve seen an unmeasurable increase in performance, Eugenio said. We cut all of our backups and all of our ETL and import/export processes that used to take anywhere between 45 minutes to hours down to minutes. AHCS also executed a complete migration from a subsite to their main co-location facility without disruption. We did it during production hours. Our developers were developing and continued to progress on our agile scrum development without any impact, Eugenio said. Key Highlights INDUSTRY: ENTERPRISE BUSINESS, HEALTHCARE KEY BENEFITS: Scale-out Guaranteed performance High availability In-line efficiency SOLUTION: SolidFire SF3010 deployed in Florida-based data center Enabled consolidation of multiple databases, environments Improved ETL and import process times by more than 4.5x Reduced power and cooling costs by 4x In addition to dramatic performance improvements, AHCS has enjoyed a reduction in power and cooling costs. We ve gone from having to support around 60 amps of storage down to 20, which is a huge savings for us, Edward said. We re paying $400, where we were paying $1600 before. That s a huge power savings for us. SolidFire provides uptime and performance. What s not to recommend based on the performance and scalability, the fact we don t have to have blackout windows for our coders? Eugenio said. Today we can honestly say that we have a solution that provides a minimum of five nines. 5

6 Be fueled by SolidFire. Do what s never been done info@