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Technology enables doubling of annual donor registrations and extends global services, helping to save more lives

Be The Match leverages NetApp technology

Highlights:

  • Technology is instrumental in helping Be The Match save more lives
  • Be The Match has transformed its IT infrastructure with NetApp storage at its core
  • Building on NetApp enables Be The Match to access and analyze member data with greater speed and flexibility
  • As a result, Be The Match is reducing patients' time to transplant, increasing potential donor registrations, and making more key data available to international partners


For Be The Match®, which operates the world’s largest listing of potential marrow donors and donated cord blood units, data is life. Thousands of patients with life-threatening diseases like leukemia, lymphoma and sickle cell disease need a marrow transplant every year but don’t have a match in their family. Operated by the nonprofit National Marrow Donor Program®, Be The Match helps connect these patients with donors. To save more lives, it needed a technology foundation that would act as an enabler, not a constraint. That’s why Be The Match is built on NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP).

Technology has a life-saving impact

“The ability to make faster decisions and to analyze information in real time has a direct impact on the lives of our patients, making our storage platform a critical piece to our success,” said Michael Jones, chief information officer of Be The Match. “With NetApp, we have been able to greatly accelerate the flow of data, which has enabled us to facilitate 50% more transplants around the world. NetApp has been instrumental in helping us save more lives.”

By giving patients access to a registry of more than 15 million donors and 400,000 umbilical cord blood units, Be The Match helps facilitate thousands of potentially life-saving transplants every year. Transplant doctors search the Be The Match Registry® using a sophisticated matching algorithm application that is 100 million times more complex than blood typing programs.

Since 2007, the number of transplants facilitated per year has risen steadily, from 3,700 to 5,500. Be The Match has set a goal to facilitate 10,000 by 2015. This aggressive growth, coupled with the sheer complexity and volume of data, triggered the organization to transform its existing IT infrastructure with NetApp® storage at its core. By building on NetApp, Be The Match was able to turn its IT environment into a catalyst for life-saving speed and flexibility.

NetHelp helps push the envelope of what is possible

As a result of its overall transformation program, Be The Match realized a number of benefits that allowed it to speed the process of discovery, extend its global reach, and create more accurate matches, directly helping the organization save more lives.

“The work that Be The Match does is incredible and has touched so many lives around the world," said Rob Salmon, executive vice president of Field Operations, NetApp. "For Be The Match, data is the most precious resource, and their IT transformation has revolutionized the way they work and the research they can conduct. To have NetApp serve as the foundation for the new infrastructure is proof that the right technology can truly help save lives.”

Highlights include:  

  • A newly integrated application suite, which includes consolidating Be The Match data onto a NetApp platform, has allowed Be The Match to reduce the time to transplant by 15%. Because many patients have diseases that can progress very quickly, the window of opportunity to identify a donor and perform a transplant can be as small as months or even weeks. Cutting the time to transplant helps patients move more quickly through the transplant process and improves their chance of survival.
  • Be The Match has doubled its annual donor registrations by building a new donor recruitment portal as a result of its shared IT infrastructure on NetApp. The new portal helped increase annual donor registrations, from an average of 360,000 per year from 2000 to 2008 to about 850,000 for the last two years. The more potential donors on the Be The Match Registry, the higher the likelihood that a patient will find a match.
  • NetApp is able to deliver the performance and bandwidth required to rapidly complete complex analytics and to run 10 times more concurrent matching algorithm searches than on Be The Match's legacy storage. The result helps improve matching accuracy and boost survival rates.
  • NetApp’s leading efficiency capabilities have enabled Be The Match to reduce capacity requirements by 900TB and dramatically simplify overall management, allowing it to scale from 65TB to 350TB without adding any new resources. The efficiency gains also enable the organization to lower overall storage costs, which is of paramount importance for a nonprofit organization.
  • Moving to a NetApp foundation has enabled Be The Match to improve information visibility and sharing across applications and user groups, which is critical for its partner network of 525 affiliated organizations in 40 countries. Because nearly half of all transplants involve an international donor or recipient, Be The Match will make its services available to its affiliates via a private cloud built on NetApp.

About NetApp

NetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions that accelerate business breakthroughs and deliver outstanding cost efficiency. Discover NetApp’s passion for helping companies around the world go further, faster at netapp.com.

About Be The Match

Learn more about Be The Match and the National Marrow Donor Program.