Case Study: Health Sciences North cuts CT scan reporting from two days to 15 minutes with Dell EMC storage solutions

Health Sciences North - Customer Case Study

Health Sciences North (HSN), one of Ontario’s largest healthcare providers, was overwhelmed by massive data growth from EMR adoption, higher‑resolution CT scans (up to a terabyte per scan), and virtualization. Its legacy storage capacity was exhausted, causing slow application performance, increased trouble calls, and backups taking up to 72 hours. HSN chose Dell EMC for a comprehensive storage, archive, and backup modernization.

Dell EMC deployed VNX2 unified storage with VPLEX, Isilon scale‑out storage, Data Domain and the Data Protection Suite, plus FAST/MCx flash optimization and replication. The deployment cut CT scan report times from two days to 15 minutes, improved image retrieval by 33%, reduced trouble tickets, and shrank backup windows from 72 hours to under 24 hours (virtual backups now 2–3 hours), achieved 155:1 backup compression, delivered near‑petabyte scalable storage with high uptime, and reduced NEODIN storage staff from 3 to 1.5 FTEs.

Health Sciences North

Patrick Harkins

Infrastructure Director