REVIEWER: Gary Feierstein, vice
president of information technology, Premier, Inc.
BACKGROUND: Premier, Inc. is a strategic
healthcare alliance owned by 200 of the nation's leading hospital and
healthcare systems. These systems operate or are affiliated with 1,500
hospital facilities and hundreds of other healthcare sites. Premier
provides informatics services and solutions to its alliance members and
other subscribing hospitals, helping these organizations leverage data to
make more informed, intelligent business decisions.
PLATFORMS: Our informatics group is using
the Netezza Performance Server (NPS) 8150 for production and an NPS 8050
for development. Our supply chain group is using an NPS 8050 for
production and a separate NPS 8050 for development.
PROBLEM SOLVED:
We were hampered by constant, expensive upgrades to expand our
storage, server, processing and data warehousing capacity to accommodate
our growth. Running volumes of complex analytics queries on our IBM
RedBrick database was delivering results much too late to be beneficial.
We selected the NPS system to overcome this problem and meet future
demands. The NPS system provides exceptional response times when directly
accessing the warehouse via our custom MicroStrategy Web-based application
to perform complex, ad hoc queries. In addition, by loading staging data
directly into Netezza and using SQL scripts to perform much of our ETL
processing directly against the database as a complement to our ETL
engine, we were able to dramatically reduce the time required to refresh
our data warehouse for our customers.
PRODUCT FUNCTIONALITY: By
architecturally integrating database, server and storage within a single
appliance, the NPS system handles multiterabyte data loads and delivers
real-time results that help us identify the most optimal courses of action
for hospitals and patients. The NPS system powers informatics queries
using applications from SAS, Hyperion's Brio and MicroStrategy, which
allow users to access and analyze information. Gleaning valuable
information from an analysis of a 2 billion-row database containing three
years of patient-level data formerly took hours; with the NPS system, the
process takes just minutes.
STRENGTHS: The NPS system performs
complex analysis significantly faster and for a much lower cost than
traditional systems. Because we don't need to expend any effort on the
traditional tuning and operational tasks associated with large data
warehouses, we have been able to continue developing and deploying new
applications and services for our customers, which has provided us great
time-to-market advantages. Prior to the deployment of Netezza, we spent a
substantial amount of time manually partitioning data and breaking up our
query requests into smaller, more manageable logical units of work to
execute requests in a reasonable amount of time. With Netezza, we can now
efficiently run queries against our entire data warehouse, regardless of
query complexity.
WEAKNESSES:
Because we were one of Netezza's early adopters, we experienced
growing pains, especially around the area of third-party vendor support.
Yet, Netezza never let us down.
SELECTION CRITERIA: We required
a system that could deliver a significant increase in speed and depth for
complex queries within our Perspective data warehouse, the largest and
most complete repository of clinical and resource utilization data for the
nation's hospitals and healthcare systems. The price/performance advantage
clearly made the NPS system a perfect fit for Premier's strategic
technology direction.
DELIVERABLES: Our pharmaceutical research
services (PRS) team was one of the first divisions within Premier
Healthcare Informatics to benefit from the enhanced performance querying
capabilities of the NPS system. The PRS team was able to successfully
perform their complex queries and complete detailed research in
record-breaking time.
VENDOR
SUPPORT: Netezza support has been exceptional. They have always
responded quickly and professionally to any issues that we have
encountered, and have gone out of their way to ensure that our
expectations for performance, reliability and functionality are always
exceeded.
DOCUMENTATION:
Netezza provided all of the necessary documentation required for the
successful installation and operation of the NPS system.
Netezza Performance Server System Netezza Corporation 200
Crossing Boulevard 5th Floor Framingham, MA
01702 508-665-6800 http://www.netezza.com/
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