Laserfiche Scales to Meet Content Management Needs of i5/OS Shop

Published: October 2, 2007

by Alex Woodie

When Marina Medical Billing Service contacted Laserfiche about setting up a document scanning and retrieval system, the emergency medical care billing agency based near Los Angeles, California, had concerns about the scalability of the Laserfiche system. Following a demonstration, the i5/OS shop decided the Windows-based Laserfiche could handle its high-volume environment.

Before making its selection, Marina Medical Billing Service required Laserfiche to prove that it could handle not only its current workload, but twice the highest load forecast generated in its upcoming expansion plans. For Marina Billing, which uses CPU Medical Management Systems' core i5/OS-based billing and practice management software, that meant 200 concurrent users processing 100,000 documents per day, or 1,200 in and out reads per second. The scanning portion of the setup would have to process 255 pages per minute, and failover from a crashed server had to be done in 15 minutes. All told, 60 million pages would have to be processed.

The tests were run for an hour, and the results tabulated. According to Laserfiche, the Windows Server 2003-based Hewlett-Packard DL380 G5 server on which the Laserfiche server was running peaked at 60 percent capacity, and then only for a minute. That was well under Laserfiche's tolerance of 80 percent capacity for 10 minutes. The DL380 running the SQL Server 2005 database, meanwhile, peaked at just 25 percent capacity.

Meanwhile, the failover mechanism also worked, according to Laserfiche. The virtualized environment, running on software from VMware, was able to get back online within four minutes following the unplugging of one side of the hardware.

The practice run satisfied Marina Billing's concerns about the scalability of Laserfiche's software, and in July, Laserfiche announced that the company signed a contract for its content management system.

Marsha Besley, founder and president of Marina Medical, says she expects Laserfiche to lower labor costs and expedite billing. "We are committed to implementing the best technology has to offer to ensure that we provide superior billing service to our clients," she says.

                     Post this story to del.icio.us
               Post this story to Digg
    Post this story to Slashdot