NMDP

Every year, 18,000 patients are diagnosed with life-threatening blood cancers or other diseases like sickle cell for which a blood stem cell transplant from an unrelated donor may be their best or only hope of a cure. Yet only 30% of patients have a fully matched donor in their family. 

NMDP operates the world's most diverse blood stem cell donor registry, enabling doctors to find matching donors for their patients. Over the past 35 years, NMDP has impacted more than 130,000 people through cell therapy and partners with more than 200 transplant centers around the world. 

The organization also provides financial assistance, one-on-one support, advocacy and education to patient families and conducts research to help patients live longer, healthier lives. 

Applications that must perform 

The application developed by NMDP integrates with partnered hospitals' systems, allowing care teams to easily search for patient donor matches. But as the database grows and more diverse organizations around the world use matching and research applications, NMDP must ensure sensitive data is accurate and secure. 

The organization's IT infrastructure is built around two data centers, one on-premises and a backup center 12 miles away. The storage infrastructure is approximately 1PB divided into thirds between SQL and Oracle databases and file systems. The VMware environment consists of hundreds of hypervisors and several thousand VMs. 

NetApp helps NMDP reduce infrastructure complexity, develop and deliver more services, and improve security to facilitate more life-saving matches. 

About 10 years ago, we chose NetApp as our partner to help rebuild our infrastructure. And we’re now able to facilitate many blood stem cell transplants per year. 

Moving off legacy systems and tape has improved NMDP's applications and databases significantly, reducing the backup recovery window to under 15 minutes. Database administrators can now self-manage and support faster development.

As NMDP expands its goals, the infrastructure needs to expand as well. NetApp supports the team in this ongoing effort by reducing complexity, developing and delivering more services, and improving security.

Teams are able to be more efficient, even in complex environments. Development teams can produce faster and have more productive sprints while staying nimble and responsive to changing business demands.