HealthX Revs Up Its SAN By Eliminating Planned Downtime

When Indianapolis-based HealthX installed a new storage management system in 2003, it was not a Xiotech system. "We'd never even heard of Xiotech," says Vice President of Technology Jim Jordan. "We installed an IBM FAStT500 with all the disk capacity we needed and performance specs that should have met our needs." Once in place, however, the system fell significantly short of expectations. The FAStT simply wasn't keeping up with user demands.

HealthX provides online information services for customers of 25 to 30 percent of the U.S. healthcare industry's third-party administrators. The company's database stores over 90 million healthcare claims for 2.4 million users, and the system is called on to handle 1.4 million interactions a month, each of which can entail multiple Web hits.

The problem was that, while the FAStT system's caching capability provided satisfactory I/O speed in bursts, it couldn't keep up with the sustained demands placed on it in a 24x7 operation. "We were maxed out," says Jordan. "We had plenty of available disk space on the system, but we couldn't use it because of the I/O bottleneck. So, despite the available disk capacity we couldn't grow our business."

For a company that has grown 5,000 percent in five years and was ranked #57 on the Deloitte Fast 500, "not growing business" wasn't an acceptable option, so the search for a replacement storage area network (SAN) began.