Chicago-based Valence Health is addressing rapid infrastructure expansion and increased IT demands by deploying SAS High-Performance Analytics on HP Converged Infrastructure. SAS Grid Computing, a part of the SAS High-Performance Analytics portfolio from the leader in business analytics software and services, helps the health care company manage load balancing and scalability associated with an unprecedented increase in customers.

Privately held Valence Health offers clients nationwide patient-centered solutions that complement workflows, and empower physicians and staff to use data to improve outcomes. But with unexpected growing pains taxing IT, the company quickly needed an infrastructure that would enable agile and rapid service delivery while driving down costs.

"The high level of new customer acquisitions was challenging IT. We needed to expand quickly and, in some cases, upgrade our computing environment," said Steve Tutewohl, Senior Vice President of Data Analytics Valence Health. "The vast knowledge and experience from SAS and HP, which was further exhibited through extensive benchmarking, indicated that SAS Grid Manager would address our needs. We can now run complex analytics faster and continuously, without disruption to IT or our organization."

SAS dramatically reduced the time it was taking to respond to the demands on IT from rapid and unexpected growth. Part of the SAS High-Performance Analytics portfolio, SAS Grid Manager provides a central point for administering policies, programs and prioritization to achieve business goals across multiple users and groups under a given set of constraints.

"With pending health care reforms and the evolving market, health care organizations must leverage advanced analytics and deliver high-performance, near-real-time results to remain competitive," said Scott VanValkenburgh, SAS Senior Director of Alliances. "Companies like Valence Health will be ahead of the curve by running their SAS jobs faster and more efficiently. The expandable platform handles jobs that were too large or too slow to run on traditional hardware platforms."

Valence Health deployed its new SAS Grid Computing environment on HP Converged Infrastructure, allowing it to speed time to deployment through fully tested reference architecture designs. With the HP 3PAR T800 Storage system, Valence Health was able to take advantage of leading throughput and availability for SAS deployments. Additionally, HP ProLiant BL460c G7 server blades combined with HP BladeSystem c7000 enclosures provided Valence Health with the flexible infrastructure needed for its SAS Grid Computing software.

"Clients need to simplify IT environments and deliver improved economics without sacrificing the reliability or security of an organization's business," said Doug Oathout, Vice President, Worldwide Marketing, Converged Infrastructure, HP. "The HP Converged Infrastructure running SAS Analytics has enabled Valence Health to deploy its solution in weeks, increasing business agility and security while providing superior reliability services to the organization."

SAS Grid Computing enables customers to use industry-standard systems to scale business processes, and accelerate decisions by automating system management capabilities while optimizing application processes in a grid computing environment.

Today's announcement was made at SAS Global Forum, the world's largest gathering of SAS users, attended by more than 3,400 business and IT users of SAS software and solutions.