Founded in 1979 as a non-profit health maintenance organization (HMO), Tufts Health Plan is the country’s 12^th largest HMO with a current membership of 937,014. With corporate headquarters in Waltham, MA, Tufts offers a full range of healthcare coverage options to individual consumers through employer groups and is ranked third in the country for overall member satisfaction according to USA Today.

Since Tufts’ inception, they experienced space problems on one of their HP3000 production systems, a system that contained primarily static data that needed to be stored on-line. In addition, their test systems contained data that needed to be stored and moved quickly. Prior to implementing SafeCapacity, they were storing data to tape and restoring it as needed. There was a continuous cycle of purchasing more drives and a highly labor-intensive effort on the pat of system administrators to accommodate space requirements.

To break this cycle, Tufts decided to implement SafeCapacity. In addition to virtually eliminating out-of-disk-space events using automatic migration, SafeCapacity’s policy-driven compression feature significantly enhances the efficiency of using existing disk space.

With the implementation of SafeCapacity, Tufts Health Plan saved 450 million sectors of disk capacity without having to move files off the system to tape. The implementation of Safecapacity on this single system translated into annual savings of approximately $45,000. Tom Trebino, Systems Administrator at Tufts explained, "[SafeCapacity, formerly called e-Space] has allowed us to store some static databases on-line as opposed to [off-line}stores and restores. On our test systems, it has allowed us to perform on-line backup and restores faster without operator intervention." Trebino continued, "With the addition of [SafeCapacity, formerly called e-Space], we are more responsive to our application group’s needs, providing faster and more accurate restores by storing the databases on-line and doing disk to disk restores." Since SafeCapacity does not change any file attributes when migrating or compressing files, the installation and use of SafeCapacity on Tuft’s system is completely transparent to Tuft’s system users.

By implementing SafeCapacity, Tufts saved both time and money while increasing user satisfaction.