Putting IBM Flash Tech to Work, From Beverage to Travel Firms

by Darryl K. Taft

Memorial Hermann Health System, the largest nonprofit health care system in South East Texas, manages 12 hospitals and more than 100 outpatient locations and supports a network of 5,000 affiliated physicians. Doctors at Memorial Hermann require rapid, reliable access to patients’ medical records and fast insight into changing health indicators. The organization deployed extremely high-performance IBM FlashSystem and IBM Flex System, which provides fast access to patient records and supports real-time analysis of medical data.

Texas-based health care organization Kelsey-Seybold Clinic, which serves nearly half a million patients in more than 20 clinic locations turned to IBM FlashSystem to run virtual desktops for the health organization’s doctors and their full-time staff of nearly 3,000 employees. IBM FlashSystem is used to deliver EMR’s (electronic medical records) and patient information to clinics throughout the Houston, Texas, area. Through the use of FlashSystem, in conjunction with other IBM technology, Kelsey-Seybold Clinic has been able to reduce energy costs, decrease rack space and operate with increased server speed.

Royal Caribbean, the world’s second largest cruise line operator, manages 41 ships, which travel throughout 460 destinations worldwide. With flash storage, Royal Caribbean plans to increase its data storage capacity by around 3.5 percent annually through 2017. As a result of using IBM storage technology, including IBM FlashSystem and IBM Spectrum Virtualize (formerly IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller), Royal Caribbean can manage huge data volumes, grow its business and boost the quality of guest experiences.

As the largest distributor of Coca-Cola Company products in the United States, Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated (CCBCC) rolls out 18,000 cases of beverages every hour from 47 distribution centers to customers across the Southeastern United States. CCBCC collaborated with IBM and is using software-defined storage and flash. Flash storage technology has dramatically improved their demand forecasting. Flash gives CCBCC a way to extract deeper demand insights at least four times faster than traditional storage systems. It helps match manufacturing output with demand to reduce the risk of overstocking or understocking, and it enables earlier logistics planning to increase profitability. Processing jobs that previously took 45 minutes were reduced to just six.

IBM flash technology’s ability to help reduce energy and cooling costs got the attention of The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, one of the largest grocery store companies in the Northeastern United States. With 300 stores, representing seven branded retail operations, including the popular A&P supermarket chain, the company was challenged simultaneously by swelling data volumes and increasing demands for higher performance. The retailer turned to IBM flash storage, which enabled them to migrate 40TB of data from seven hard-drive storage systems to a single IBM FlashSystem, saving the company not only valuable data center floor space, but cooling and energy costs.

To meet demands for faster and easier access to cloud-based information, European managed services provider Cegeka turned to IBM storage virtualization and flash technologies. An increase in customers resulted in demand for improved storage technology. Cegeka, which provides private cloud solutions, telephony services and more in Belgium, The Netherlands, Poland and Romania, chose the IBM FlashSystem 820 storage system. The all-flash appliance, which is 20-times faster than traditional, refrigerator-sized hard drive systems, can store up to 24 terabytes of data in a unit the size of a pizza box, IBM said.