Case Study: Piedmont HealthCare achieves faster backups and 40% OpEx savings with Cohesity

Large North Carolina Medical Group Deploys Pure and Cohesity for Modern Storage Solution

Piedmont HealthCare is a large physician-owned, multi‑specialty medical group based in Statesville, NC, with more than 50 locations, about 200 providers and ~1,000 employees. Facing an EMC Networker renewal, PHC struggled with a cumbersome secondary storage environment—slow, failure‑prone backups, a tedious 10–15 step process to add VMs, lack of auto‑discovery/auto‑protect and lengthy vendor‑dependent troubleshooting—which prompted a full re-evaluation of its data management infrastructure.

Working with SHI, PHC deployed Cohesity (2500 hyperconverged nodes) alongside Pure Storage for primary storage, enabling automated snapshots, instant recoveries and a Google‑like search. The one‑day install yielded dramatic results: SQL backups cut from up to 10 hours to under 2, file backups reduced to under an hour or minutes, faster RPO/RTO, in‑house upgrades, a 2:1 data reduction freeing >60% of cluster capacity, and estimated OpEx savings of up to 40%, with plans to expand test/dev and file‑sharing use.

Piedmont Healthcare

Mike House

Chief Information Officer