Newfoundland and Labrador opts for ‘utility model’ of data storage

Robert Drover, director of information technology at Newfoundland and Labrador Health Services, no longer loses sleep over having to compete for capital every five years to replace the health authority’s data storage infrastructure – not since acquiring Pure Storage’s Evergreen/One storage as-a-service.

“These were battles we needed to have with everyone else looking for money from the government and, typically, information technology is the last to the dinner table when you’re competing against MRI machines,” he stated. “Everything we do in technology is so big now that we can’t operate on a capital procurement model. Every solution we’ve introduced in the last five years has had a multi-million-dollar price tag, so we had to find a way to operationalize these costs.”

With the five-year refresh point in plain view for its two storage solutions in 2020 – both of which were based on spinning disk technology – Drover was determined to put an end to the battle for capital.

“A request for proposals went out and all the major players bid on it,” recalled Drover. “So did Pure Storage and when I read through their proposal, it was quite compelling. It gave us a lower total cost of ownership and the utility model that we wanted.”

Drover added, “It was a game changer not having to worry about procuring capital. I could now operationalize this expense.”

“Evergreen/One combines the flexibility of cloud storage with the security and performance of an on premise all-flash, secure sustainable infrastructure,” said Bill Bryer, Pure Storage healthcare lead for Canada. “This guaranteed, SLA-driven storage service improves how data is stored, mobilized, and protected.”

The upgrades are performed without any interruption of service. And rather than competing for scarce capital resources, the health authority pays a monthly subscription fee based on the consumption of the storage it uses.

With the Pure Storage solution, IT doesn’t have to worry about having enough storage capacity, especially with the volume of data exploding and fluctuating due to AI and research-related demands.

“We wanted to have the storage available to us when we need it, but when we don’t need it, we don’t have to pay for it,” said Drover.

Bryer explains there’s a “committed rate” the health authority pays and an “on-demand rate” they pay for when storage demand spikes.

“The utility model is the way of the future,” Drover predicted. “This is the way the cloud has presented itself to the industry. They operate on a utility model as well. The client pays for what they use, and they look after housing it, feeding it and maintaining it.

“Customers are looking for a service that delivers a cloud operating experience, but also has predictable costs,” noted Bryer.

With Pure’s as-a-service model, customers get the cloud operating experience, in a non-disruptive architecture backed by 10 guaranteed SLAs, including performance, capacity, availability, efficiency, and cyber recovery.

The Pure Storage proposal also solved another problem by relieving Drover’s IT team of responsibility for the care of the solution.

Recruiting IT resources is one of the health authority’s biggest challenges. “On any given day we have 30 to 40 open positions, so I can’t use my staff to be caretakers of this equipment. I need my staff to work with the doctors and nurses and everybody else to help solve the challenges they have. And who better to care for the equipment than the people who built it? We benefit from that because all of the security patches and updates are taken care of,” said Drover.

Easing the burden on IT resources is also critical as the department has its hands full with several major projects, including the adoption of an Epic EHR, a personal health record application and a virtual health solution.

Having experienced a ransomware attack in October 2021 that impacted the delivery of healthcare services, Drover is confident that the Pure Storage solution will expedite recovery in any future disruptions.

“This technology from Pure Storage gives us an immutable copy of our data,” he explained. “A ransomware attack can still happen, but it won’t get this immutable copy. What this means is it might hit us as it did before and shut us down, but we’ll only be down for however long it takes us to repoint it to the immutable copy, which is less than an hour.”

The use of solid-state drives also has an environmental benefit because Pure Storage arrays run on about the same power as a toaster, said Bryer. “That’s important when you consider that data centres currently account for about 2 percent of the world’s power consumption and, as AI kicks in, the volume of data storage increases 15 to 20 percent per year.”

Drover estimates that the all-flash arrays reduce the department’s carbon footprint by 40 percent and saves it in the range of $100,000 in electricity costs per year.

Lightning-fast data retrieval speeds are yet another benefit of Pure Storage’s Evergreen/One solution, remarked Drover. “This means that when a doctor needs an X-ray, it’s instantaneous, so the end-user experience is much better.”

“Pure Storage continues to revolutionize enterprise data storage and eliminates storage change management outages forever,” said Bryer. “Investing more than 20 percent of revenue in R&D, we believe that Pure Storage continues to be the only data storage platform future-proofed for innovation.”

Founded in 2009, Pure Storage has offices around the world, over 12,500 customers, 5,600 employees, annual revenues of US$2.8 billion (most recent full year earnings announced in February) and one of the highest net promoter scores in the industry of 82, but “is still relatively new to the game,” acknowledged Bryer.

With Pure Storage, organizations have ultimate simplicity and flexibility, saving time, money, and energy. Drover and his team are one of many customers realizing the value Pure Storage brings to their organization.