Carilion Clinic: Simplifying Data at Scale for Better Patient Care
How Qumulo helps a leading healthcare provider manage clinical data, reduce complexity, and scale effortlessly
As a not-for-profit healthcare system serving communities across southwestern Virginia, Carilion Clinic operates hospitals, urgent care centers, specialty clinics, and an academic medical center in partnership with Virginia Tech. With clinical applications, medical imaging, and video surveillance driving a rapid increase in unstructured data, Carilion needed a smarter, more scalable way to store and manage data across multiple sites.
“We needed a straightforward solution to address growing storage, processing, and governance demands. Our existing systems were too expensive, complex, and hard to scale,” said Chris Painter, Carilion’s infrastructure lead.
Before moving to Qumulo, Carilion relied on storage solutions from Hitachi and NetApp—platforms that struggled with latency, performance, and scale, especially as data volumes surged. Integrating new hardware was challenging, reporting was limited, and the system’s complexity made maintenance a burdensome task.
Qumulo changed that.
Carilion implemented two 4-node C208 clusters in each data center, then expanded to 8-node C432 clusters—and they’re still growing. Qumulo’s simplicity enabled Carilion to quickly power up new nodes, connect them to the network, and let the system handle the rest. With fast, seamless deployments and easy upgrades, the infrastructure team reclaimed valuable time and reduced operational overhead.
“We saw improvements from day one. Qumulo is easy to maintain, code upgrades take 15 minutes, and scalability is effortless. It just works.”
We saw improvements from day one. Qumulo is easy to maintain, code upgrades take 15 minutes, and scalability is effortless. It just works.
Chris Painter
Infrastructure Lead at Carilion Clinic
The benefits go far beyond hardware management. With high-performance multiprotocol access, built-in data protection, and real-time analytics, Carilion now supports its diverse workloads—including imaging, video, and clinical applications—with confidence.
“We love the built-in analytics. Monitoring bandwidth usage, identifying storage blind spots, and managing quotas are all easier than ever.”
Qumulo’s support also made a lasting impression. Carilion’s team works closely with Qumulo engineers to address challenges and explore future opportunities, including plans to evaluate Azure Native Qumulo (ANQ) for future cloud expansion.
Business Impact
Simplified system maintenance and drastically reduced upgrade time
Seamless scalability across growing data centers and workloads
Improved performance for critical applications, including imaging and surveillance
Trusted support partnership with responsive, knowledgeable Qumulo engineers
“Qumulo eliminated our hardware headaches, scaled with our growth, and gave us the tools to manage our data proactively.”
With Qumulo, Carilion Clinic continues to strengthen its data infrastructure to support exceptional patient care, today and in the future.