Leonard-McDowell to Provide Enterprise-Class Storage Solutions for the Healthcare Industry

April 7, 2010 - PRLog -- Leonard-McDowell to Provide Enterprise-Class Storage Solutions for the Healthcare Industry

Leonard-McDowell offers a scalable and unified data storage infrastructure from Scale Computing to support healthcare organizations’ growing medical costs

ZIONSVILLE, IND. (April 7, 2010 )  Leonard-McDowell, an expert provider of sales and IT solutions for the healthcare and life sciences industries, announces an alliance with Scale Computing, a developer and manufacturer of complete, end-to-end midmarket clustered storage solutions.

According to University California Berkeley, School of Information Management and Systems, more data has been gathered over the last three years than the previous 40,000 years combined. Storing and protecting data is vital for any organization, and for the healthcare industry it is a growing need. Many hospitals, doctors’ offices and clinics are not only supporting more digital data than ever before, but also retaining the data on-site and off-site for longer periods of time due to compliance requirements, as well as serving growing and aging populations.

“There is a significant growth in healthcare storage of diagnostic and scanned images, and diagnostic video,” said Dr. Todd Rowland, executive director of HealthLINC, a health information exchange committed to improving care in Southern Indiana. “All of these activities are likely to continue.”

Many legislative, economic and cultural issues are driving the demand for sophisticated storage solutions within the healthcare industry, which include:
•growing and aging populations increase the demand for health care services,
•increasing difficulty to store more data for longer periods of time inexpensively,
•transferring paper records or film documents to EMR (electronic medical records),
•following U.S. HIPPA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), Medicare and Medicaid compliance requirements,
•receiving ARRA (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009) incentives.

“Healthcare providers must consider their budgets, performance and compliance requirements when choosing a storage vendor,” said Frank Leonard, managing partner of Leonard-McDowell. “After much research, we approached Scale Computing because we are confident in its company and products. We are proud to offer our customers a cost-effective, reliable and flexible solution.”

Recently awarded Best New Product Infrastructure Category by PC Mall, Scale’s storage portfolio is based on the company’s Intelligent Clustered Storage (ICS) technology, which enables users to add storage hardware, known as storage nodes, as necessary without suspending services or migrating data. IT managers are able to build out storage clusters, starting with just three usable terabytes up to the multiple petabyte range on a single file system. As a unified storage platform, Scale’s Starter Cluster line of products provides for simultaneous SAN and NAS services from a single pool of storage, providing enterprise-class, truly clustered, and highly scalable storage at a fraction of the price of competing solutions.

Available on both the Scale Storage Nodes and IBM’s System X servers, Scale Computing’s Starter Clusters are available immediately through Leonard-McDowell. For additional information, visit http://leonard-mcdowell.com or call 317.873.4632.

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Leonard-McDowell is an expert provider of sales and IT solutions for the healthcare and life sciences industries. Leonard-McDowell partners with technology providers that offer pragmatic solutions that help clients succeed within their industries.