Carilion Clinic: Simplifying Data at Scale for Better Patient Care

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.”