At Boys Town, we’re focused on improving the lives of at-risk children, leading them toward a brighter, healthier future. Boys Town’s most recent strategic direction has been to focus on providing early intervention and preventative services in communities with high densities of at-risk children and families. Our consultants, commonly referred to as caregivers, provide Care Coordination Services, Therapy Services, In-Home Family Services, and Common Sense Parenting Classes to students and their parents. Boys Town continues to expand its care network, reaching more than two million people annually, making it one of the country’s largest non-profit child-care agencies. Here in IT, we’re rolling out a new generation of tools that are breaking barriers in mobility to help caregivers provide the best possible service to the children in our communities.
It wasn’t always easy for our caregivers to provide the desired service levels when interacting with children and their families. The challenge we faced was that our off-the-charts data growth slowed access to vital data, cutting into valuable time our caregivers spent with our children and families. This is why we selected EMC XtremIO: to fire up performance and help us provide lightning-speed engagements with our community base.
We first leveraged XtremIO for a VDI roll-out. Previously, virtual desktops were a large pain-point for Boys Town, taking forever to boot up and load, causing a poor end-user experience. Since supporting our VDI environment on XtremIO, our virtual desktop performance has improved significantly. We have also seen an incredible performance increase in all of our mission-critical application performance, specifically our National Youth Care Database (NDB), which our caregivers use to ensure that children and their families are safe and receiving the care and treatment they need.
With XtremIO’s deduplication and compression capabilities, it has been incredibly easy to add new applications and data sources, such as CRM, without any lag in performance, allowing us to enhance our offerings to the communities we serve. Within a year’s time, XtremIO has gone from handling 700 to 4,000 different data sources that include everything from children’s reading logs at our schools, to our HVAC systems in our residential village of 75 homes, to pharmaceuticals prescribed to our children. XtremIO enabled the expansion of our Boys Town National Hotline, housing all of the very confidential information that is generated from this critical service. Boys Town will celebrate our 100th anniversary in 2017, and as part of the celebration, IT is in the process of digitizing all of Boys Town’s historical records. We have no doubt that XtremIO is well-equipped to handle this workload.
As a non-profit, keeping close attention to cost and efficiency is very important, and XtremIO has exceeded our expectations, allowing Boys Town to reallocate funds to what’s most critical to our business: helping children and their families. XtremIO is extremely easy-to-use and the management interface has helped our staff tremendously. Collectively, the time we spend managing storage has plummeted significantly.
While XtremIO is ideal for our critical applications, we’re also using other EMC solutions across our environment such as EMC Isilon, which stores our facility monitoring videos, CIFS, and SMB files. We also rely on EMC Avamar and EMC Data Domain for data protection, and EMC ScaleIO software-defined storage to give our test and development team quicker, more agile access to IT resources.
In addition to the technical benefits EMC solutions bring to Boys Town, we also value that EMC genuinely cares about our organization’s mission of saving children and their families. We see this every day in the way EMC services and supports us, and through the time they put into recommending and co-creating the right solutions for Boys Town. EMC goes the extra mile to make sure our IT infrastructure is giving our caregivers fast, easy access to the technology tools they need to help deliver compassionate care to our children.