AWS for Industries

Amazon delivers leading Epic database performance in public cloud for healthcare

AWS has, again, increased scalability of global references per second (GRref/s) for Epic on AWS customers. This represents a 260% increase since being approved as a public cloud provider for Epic customers starting in 2019. Amazon EC2 M6i instances provide this step-change in performance, resulting in the highest GRref/s scaling in the public cloud.  The AWS cloud now addresses 90% of Epic customers, supporting both Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) and Enterprise Cache Protocol (ECP) architectures.  AWS supports GRref/s performance levels of 23 million for SMP and 26 million for ECP.  Tested and validated by Epic and AWS, these new capabilities are designed to serve the needs of your mission-critical healthcare systems.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the general availability of Amazon EC2 M6i instances on August 23rd, 2021, expanding the 6th generation EC2 instance portfolio with x86-based compute options. Designed to provide a balance of compute, memory, storage, and network resources, M6i instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor. M6i instances are powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code named Ice Lake) with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz, offering up to 15% better price performance over the M5 instance, and always-on memory encryption using Intel Total Memory Encryption (TME).

To meet Epic on AWS customer demands for increased scale, AWS provides a new instance size (m6i.32xlarge) that includes 160,000 IOPS, paired with 128 vCPUs and 512 GB of memory.  The m6i provides 33% more memory and 20% higher memory bandwidth compared to M5 instances.

The price / performance of the M6i makes it a perfect fit for high-performance, mission-critical systems like Epic on AWS. With this new instance, AWS provides the performance required by large health systems, while also reducing total cost of operation.

“AWS is excited to provide this expanded capability and size to support 90% of Epic healthcare system customers’ needs. By combining Epic’s electronic medical recording (EMR) solutions with AWS’ cloud platform, we can provide our customers the best combination of performance and reliability while saving them money,” said Patrick Combes, Director, Head of Technology – Healthcare and Life Sciences at AWS.

For more information on Epic on AWS, visit the solution page.

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Sam Coker

Sam Coker

Sanford is the Worldwide Technical Lead for Healthcare at AWS. In this role, he is challenged with coordinating and creating a unified technical healthcare roadmap for AWS and their customers. Sam has a long and varied background in academic research computing as well as hospital operations. Starting at the University of Kansas getting to design and build the 6th HPC cluster, and continuing that work in molecular modelling with Schrodinger LLC and The Rockefeller University. Looking for new challenges he moved to hospital IT operations running and designing clinical systems at Weill Cornell Medical College. These included early work with LIMS, PACS/VNAs and Epic electronic medical records. This led to the opportunity of engineering and operational responsibility of all clinical systems at NYU Langone Medical Center. After surviving 2 major black outs, 2 hurricanes and a super storm named Sandy, he received a lot of practice and experience in designing, running and restoring complex healthcare systems.

Jimmy DeLurgio

Jimmy DeLurgio

Jimmy DeLurgio is a Senior Solutions Architect for Healthcare at AWS. He holds a masters in computer information systems from the University of Denver and has over ten years of healthcare and technical operations experience. He enjoys working at AWS helping healthcare customers learn about the cloud and pushing computer systems to their technical limits. When not playing with new technology, he enjoys dates with his wife, watching his kids play sports, Nordic skiing, golfing, and traveling Europe.