Be The Match customer success story

For the estimated 1.24 million blood cancer cases that occur annually worldwide, a bone marrow or cord blood transplant may be the best or only hope for a cure. Yet only 30% of patients have a family member who qualifies to be a donor.

Be The Match operates the world's largest hematopoietic cell registry, comprised of over 41 million potential donors worldwide, to enable doctors to more easily find matching donors for their patients. Over the past 35 years, Be The Match has facilitated over 120,000 bone marrow transplants and connected more than 446 medical providers around the world and 156 transplant centers in the United States.

The organization also provides transplant research, financial assistance, and one-on-one support, advocacy and education to transplant families.

The application developed by Be The Match integrates with partnered hospitals' systems, allowing care teams to easily search for patient donor matches. But as the database grows and more diverse organizations around the world use the matching and research applications, Be The Match must ensure sensitive data is accurate and secure.

The organization's IT infrastructure is built around two data centers, one on-premises and a backup center 12 miles away. The storage infrastructure is approximately 1PB divided into thirds between SQL and Oracle databases and file systems. The VMware environment consists of hundreds of hypervisors and several thousand VMs.

NetApp helps Be The Match reduce infrastructure complexity, develop and deliver more services, and improve security to facilitate more life-saving matches.

NetApp^® technologies, including an A-Series AFF A700 array and ONTAP^® and SnapCenter^® software, are central to Be The Match’s data environment and have a direct impact on the number and quality of patient donor matches.

Moving off legacy systems and tape has improved Be The Match's applications and databases significantly, reducing the backup recovery window to under 15 minutes. Database administrators can now self-manage and support faster development.

As Be The Match expands its goals, the infrastructure needs to expand as well. NetApp supports the team in this ongoing effort by reducing complexity, developing and delivering more services, and improving security.

Teams are able to be more efficient, even in complex environments. Development teams can produce faster and have more productive sprints while staying nimble and responsive to changing business demands.