Case Study: Tucson Medical Center achieves always-on, low-latency access and 98% app virtualization with NetApp

Superior Performance, “Always-On” Access Critical for Digital Hospitals

Tucson Medical Center (TMC), a 640‑bed, HIMSS Stage 7 digital hospital serving ~120,000 patients annually, faced rapidly growing Epic and clinical data and strict HIPAA retention requirements. Its legacy EMC CLARiiON storage filled in three months and couldn’t be upgraded without risking downtime, threatening always‑on access to 700+ applications and critical patient monitoring systems.

With partner cStor, TMC migrated to NetApp ONTAP on FAS/FlexPod infrastructure, gaining faster, more resilient storage and simpler management. Results included latency cut from 15ms to 4ms, virtualization of 98% of apps, the ability to spin up dev environments in 20 minutes (vs. two days), support for 1,300 concurrent users, improved recovery (SnapMirror/SnapVault) and effectively no unplanned downtime.

Tucson Medical Center

Paul Lemmons

Open Systems Group Lead