XtremIO 'outages bork US hospital patient records system'

Update XtremIO storage is reportedly failing at Fairview Health Services in Minnesota, hindering patient operations.

Fairview is a non-profit organisation with around 25,000 employees in hospitals, clinics, care homes and pharmacy shops. It traditionally used HDS storage for medical records used by its Epic patient admin system, and interfacing to some 1,500 applications. It changed to EMC XtremIO in 2015, after looking at HDS, IBM, and Pure Storage alternatives.

The CityPages report alleges that the XtremIO system is experiencing glitches that can slow user access or even crash the storage. The Hitachi storage reportedly crashed just once in 12 years. There have been three XtremIO crashes in just one year. One in April this year was a major outage lasting more than 24 hours during which the Epic system froze.

Another storage outage occurred on 1 September with Epic being unavailable for up to 10 hours.

One source suggested that there are many inaccuracies in the CityPages article. The customer is stable and nothing is happening now. The early September outage was resolved in less than 24 hours.

EMC has been asked for comment but has not responded. ®

Updated to add

EMC says: "The City Pages article was inaccurate and misleading across a wide range of facts, including the comments relating to the Dell EMC products. The Dell EMC products never went down or failed at any point. XtremIO was not the root cause of any incidents referenced in the article. Dell EMC values its strong partnership with Fairview and to serving as a top trustworthy and dependable partner from a technology, support and strategic IT relationship perspective."