InterSystems Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) and Epic Systems Corp. are said to have set a new record benchmark in a collaborative benchmark, scaling to 14,600 users — the initial benchmark had been set at 8,000 users.
The exercise was conducted in conjunction with Cleveland Clinic. The clinic has 5,000 concurrent users, and plans to scale the business to 8,000, and the benchmark was designed to ensure that there are no bottlenecks when it does so.
“The results have eclipsed the single-server Epic record while meeting stringent requirements with regard to response times,” said Henry Adams, country manager for InterSystems in South Africa (SA). “In order to make the results as accurate as possible, the benchmark used a full production version of the Epic software running a mix of electronic medical record, scheduling and registration users and operating on a realistic database.” Epic Systems supplies a suite of applications used by the Cleveland Clinic and InterSystems supplies the Cache post-relational database used to run Epic software, and HP supplies servers.
The tests were conducted on a 24-processor HP Superdome server with 8GB of memory running Cache version 5.0. The database engine delivered sustained throughput of 540,000 database accesses per second (DBAPS). “With the rapidly growing sophistication of healthcare applications, plus expanding user populations as they are rolled out across the enterprise, platform and database vendors are under enormous performance pressure. Our aim, with every new release of Cache, is to deliver measurably better performance and scalability. We test this continuously, not with artificial benchmarks, but with real-world applications such as Epic’s suite of applications. These results demonstrate that the latest version of Cache, 5.0, is meeting our performance commitment,” said Adams.
“This benchmark included an ICT topology where performance and scalability are critical in order to handle future demand. The platform tested represents not only the capabilities of today’s requirements for the Cleveland Clinic, but also provides price protection for the clinic for years to come,” said Paul Gerrard, vice-president of healthcare sales at HP. “The results are well beyond the current needs of most sites. Since this system allows for at least two more in-the-system upgrades, it certainly shows scalability to handle all of the growth that a client might want to put on a single system.”
