20 octobre 2021 Pierre Perrin-Monlouis
Leading Dental Benefits Administrator Recovers Nearly Three Terabytes of Valuable File Server Space
Hopkinton, Mass.-Monday, June 18, 2007
EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC), the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today announced that Northeast Delta Dental, a leading administrator of dental benefits in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, has gained control over soaring volumes of insurance claims by utilizing a sophisticated EMC® archiving solution. The solution, which employs EMC DiskXtender® file system archiving software and EMC Centera™ content-addressed storage, enables Delta Dental to comply more effectively with the requirements of state departments of insurance, improve the responsiveness of customer service, and extend the value of its information technology investments.
Northeast Delta Dental’s archiving implementation was recently honored at Computerworld’s Storage Networking World, having been selected in the “Best Practices in Storage” Awards Program as winner of the Innovation and Promise category. These awards recognize organizations that have created strategic business value through the innovative use of storage technologies and services.
Dan Kaplan, Manager of Networking & Technical Support for Northeast Delta Dental, said, “We are under scrutiny by three state departments of insurance and must be able to respond promptly to their requests, as well as to day-to-day inquiries from customers and dental offices. Traditionally, we stored scanned images of claims on file servers and manually archived them to tape. But as our business expanded and the volume of new claims grew to 5,000 per day, this explosion of digital images was overwhelming storage capacity on our servers and threatening to shut down our core applications. Our IT staff was consumed with moving older claims from the servers to tape, which then had to be transported to an offsite vault.
“With EMC’s file system archiving solution, our customer service representatives, state auditors, and our other employees can access claims in seconds, rather than the hours or even days it used to take our IT staff to find and restore the tapes and retrieve the claims. This solution not only saves us time and money, but also enables our company representatives to serve our customers and dentists more effectively. And we’re also able to comply with stringent state regulations more efficiently than ever before.”
Based on the recommendations of EMC Global Services, Northeast Delta Dental today applies the principles of information lifecycle management (ILM) by setting policies with DiskXtender to automatically archive any images older than three months from the file servers to the Centera storage. DiskXtender also keeps track of where each claim image is located on the archive and leaves pointers on the file servers to enable easy retrieval, speeding access and freeing valuable disk capacity on the production file servers.
“EMC DiskXtender takes a lot of burden off our IT staff and allows them to focus on more valuable activities,” stated Kaplan. “The software simply follows the policies we set, so there’s a tremendous amount of data that we just don’t have to worry about moving around any more. We’ve also gained back nearly three terabytes of space on our file servers, which has been reallocated to other applications. This allows us to get more value out of that investment and saves the cost of buying additional file servers.”
Once archived, secure long-term retention of claim images is critical to comply with the regulations of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, where Northeast Delta Dental does business. These rules dictate that claims must be retained for seven years with controls to make sure they are not altered or at risk for loss. Yet, claims also must remain easily accessible for state auditors.
“EMC Centera and EMC DiskXtender enable us to meet the demands of state departments of insurance with confidence,” asserted Kaplan. “First, the solution ensures that our archived insurance claims are secure and authentic by not only capturing the content, but also maintaining its context and structure. And because the archived claims are so easy to access, auditors can still get the information they need quickly.”
EMC Global Services provided complete implementation services for the DiskXtender and Centera archiving solution. EMC also implemented a second Centera in a separate building, deploying EMC Centera Archive Replicator software to replicate archived data for added disaster recovery protection.
“We looked at other archiving solutions, but chose EMC for its reputation in the industry for excellent products and services,” noted Kaplan. “The solution runs almost unattended and requires minimal training time. EMC’s expertise in ILM has been invaluable in defining and implementing a strong and effective archiving strategy.”
About EMC
EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) is the world’s leading developer and provider of information infrastructure technology and solutions that enable organizations of all sizes to transform the way they compete and create value from their information. Information about EMC’s products and services can be found at www.EMC.com.
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EMC Corporation
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