Healthcare systems are coping with an unprecedented level of change. They’re managing a new regulatory environment, a more complex healthcare ecosystem, and an ever-increasing demand for services—all while facing intense cost pressures.
These trends are having a dramatic impact on EMR systems and healthcare databases, which have to maintain responsiveness even as they handle more concurrent users, more data, more diverse workflows, and a wider range of application functionality.
As Intel prepared to introduce the Intel® Xeon® processor E7 v3 family, we worked with engineers from Epic and InterSystems to ensure system configurations that would provide robust, reliable performance. InterSystems and VMware were also launching their next-generation solutions, so the test team ran a series of performance tests pairing the Intel Xeon processor E7-8890 v3 with InterSystems Caché 2015.1 and a beta version of VMware vSphere ESXi 6.0.
The results were impressive. “We saw the scalability of a single operational database server increase by 60 percent,” said Epic senior performance engineer Seth Hain. “With these gains, we expect our customers to scale further with a smaller data center footprint and lower total cost of ownership.” Those results were also more than triple the end-user database accesses per second (global references or GREFs) achieved using the Intel® Xeon® processor E7-4860 with Caché® 2011.1.
These results show that your healthcare organization can use the Intel Xeon processor E7 v3 family to implement larger-scale deployments with confidence on a single, scale-up platform.
In addition, if you exceed the vertical scalability of a single server, you can use InterSystems Caché’s Enterprise Cache Protocol (ECP) to scale horizontally. Here again, recent benchmarks show great scalability. A paper published earlier this year reported more than a threefold increase in GREFs for horizontal scalability compared to previous-generation technologies.
This combination of outstanding horizontal and vertical scalability—in the cost-effective environment of the Intel® platform—is exactly what needed to meet rising demands and create a more agile, adaptable, and affordable healthcare enterprise.
What will these scalability advances mean for your healthcare IT decision makers and data center planners? How will they empower your organization deliver outstanding patient care and enhance efficiency? I hope you’ll read the whitepapers and share your thoughts. And please keep in mind: Epic uses many factors, along with benchmarking results, to provide practical sizing guidelines, so talk to your Epic system representative as you develop your scalability roadmap.
Read the whitepaper about vertical scalability with the Intel Xeon processor E7 v3.
Read the whitepaper about horizontal scalability with Intel Xeon processors.
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Steve Leibforth is a Strategic Relationship Manager at Intel Corporation
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