Case Study: SSM Health Care achieves faster Epic Caché performance and reduced storage costs with Dell EMC FAST VP and VMAX

SSM Health Care - Customer Case Study

SSM Health Care, a multi-state health system based in Saint Louis, faced long Epic batch windows, poor disk utilization and rising capital costs that slowed caregiver access to records. To address this, SSM worked with Dell EMC to deploy EMC Symmetrix VMAX with FAST VP automated tiering and a small number of enterprise flash drives (EFDs) in their production Epic Caché environment.

Dell EMC’s VMAX + FAST VP implementation shifted hot data to flash, using only a small percentage of EFDs (~5% of production drives) to deliver major gains: average LUN I/O up 12%, average LUN read response time down 38%, flash tier servicing ~50% of the workload, and average Fibre Channel disk utilization down 38%. Batch processing times improved 30–50%, ETL runtime dropped about 30% (from ~6 to ~4 hours), and all Epic Caché performance metrics were exceeded—enabling cost savings and delayed storage investments.

SSM Health Care

Roger Owensby

Manager, Enterprise Servers and Storage