KAISER PERMANENTE SELECTS SEQUENT AND HITACHI DATA SYSTEMS
FOR DATA WAREHOUSE TO TRACK PHARMACEUTICAL INFO
Sequent Computer Systems, Inc. and Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) have announced that Kaiser Permanente, America's largest not-for-profit health plan, has chosen the HDS' Freedom 5700E storage system and the Sequent NUMA-Q 2000 server, packaged and sold through HDS, as a data warehousing hardware solution for its new National Prescription Data Warehouse (NPDW).
The NPDW system incorporates data from 13 regional pharmacy information management systems as well as three claims processors and other regional systems. It will enable Kaiser Permanente to enhance the quality and reduce the costs of patient care by improving its ability to track and manage the use of pharmaceuticals and by facilitating best-practice prescribing objectives. The size of the data warehouse will start at 800 GB of disk, with the ability to scale up as data requirements grow.
"With more than 45 million prescriptions per year to track and manage, scalability was a critical factor for Kaiser Permanente's National Prescription Data Warehouse," said Jeff Pancottine, VP of worldwide marketing for Sequent. "Sequent and HDS provided the solution through the combination of the NUMA-Q 2000 server running an Oracle8 database and the Freedom 5700E to offer higher quality patient care at the lowest possible cost."
The NUMA-Q 2000 and Freedom 5700E were chosen as a UNIX-based system with the power and capacity necessary to process and house the pharmaceutical data from the tens of millions of prescriptions dispensed by Kaiser Permanente each year. The system will reside in Kaiser Permanente's Corona, California data center.
"Like Kaiser, our customers are looking for storage solutions that solve business problems," said Clive James, Vice President, HDS Storage Line of Business. "We are delighted to partner with Sequent to meet Kaiser's patients' needs. The integration of the Freedom 5700E and the 12-processor NUMA-Q 2000 server provides the performance and scalability necessary for data warehouses that handle huge amounts of data, such as the NPDW system."
Hitachi Data Systems' Freedom 5700E is an enterprise-wide open systems storage system that provides users with unsurpassed performance characteristics coupled with industry leading high availability architecture. In alliance with Sequent, HDS offers the NUMA-Q 2000 server, a breakthrough in symmetric multiprocessing.
HDS and Sequent Alliance
Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) and Sequent Computer Systems, Inc. partnered to provide open systems solutions to data center customers. HDS brings expertise in providing data center discipline to open systems solutions and customer support. Sequent is a leading provider of first call DSS/DW solutions, high availability clusters and scalable open systems platforms available. HDS and Sequent engineering are working together to ensure full integration and support of Hitachi storage systems on Sequent NUMA-Q 2000 servers.
Sequent claims to be the world's fastest-growing server vendor with systems priced between $100K and $1M in 1997 on the strength of NUMA-Q 2000, and has been the number one vendor of high-end UNIX servers in the UK for the past seven years, according to IDC. Sequent supports more than 10,000 installations worldwide, including many of the world's largest and most sophisticated OLTP, DSS and RDBMS applications.
Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) markets high-performance enterprise servers, storage systems, and professional services worldwide. Owned by Hitachi, Ltd. and EDS, HDS is headquartered in Santa Clara, California. The company employs 2,300 people and operates in 30 countries worldwide. For online information about HDS' products and services, access http://www.hds.com
Kaiser Permanente is one of America's leading health care organizations. Founded in 1945, it is a nonprofit, group-practice prepayment program with headquarters in Oakland, California. Kaiser Permanente serves the health care needs of 9.2 million members in 19 states and the District of Columbia. Nationwide, Kaiser Permanente includes more than 100,000 technical, administrative, and clerical employees and 15,000 physicians representing all specialties.