Montreal, Canada – Nov 18, 2008 — SAND Technology, Inc. (OTCBB: SNDTF.OB), an international provider of data management software and best practices, announced today that the Sherbrooke University Hospital Centre (CHUS) has successfully completed an upgrade of the server used to run its clinical research data warehouse powered by SAND/DNA Analytics™ data management software. SAND/DNA Analytics fully leverages the increased processing power of the new platform, enabling CHUS to provide medical researchers with greatly improved access to the clinical data they require while substantially reducing total cost of ownership.

The server upgrade at CHUS involved migrating the clinical data warehouse environment from a Compact Alpha ES40 OSF1 4-way 866 MHz CPU server with 16 GB of RAM to a lower-cost Linux HP DL380 G5 with two 3.16 GHz Quad-core Xeon processors and 32 GB of RAM. The resulting dramatic reduction in maintenance costs and energy demands has significantly cut total cost of ownership for the warehouse, while SAND/DNA Analytics’ linear scalability has brought a four-fold improvement in data load and query speeds. Migration of the data warehouse to the new environment was completed in three days, requiring minimal effort and involving no disruption in service.

The SAND/DNA Analytics environment used by clinical researchers at CHUS holds 96 million test results and 450 million records of individual test details spanning the last 18 years. Sensitive data is encrypted at the database level, and user access to this data is restricted in compliance with HIPAA regulations. Medical notes are automatically encoded in SNOMED (Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine) notation using SAND’s SNOMED Encoder tool as the data is loaded into the data warehouse.
“In our organization, researchers require very rapid access to a large volume of clinical data from their desktops, said Hassan Diab, Senior System Administrator for Decision Support Systems at CHUS’s Clinical Research Center. “SAND/DNA Analytics has clearly demonstrated its ability to make use of increased memory and processing power in an economical and efficient way. Furthermore, migrating the SAND/DNA environment to the new server was a simple and transparent process that didn’t require us to interrupt data warehouse services to users.”

“We are pleased to be able to show that our SAND/DNA product suite can scale linearly with increases in processing power,” said Serge Bonin, Senior Solutions Architect for SAND Technology. “This allows our clients to quickly and easily take advantage of ongoing hardware improvements, without requiring them to completely overhaul their data warehouse environment each time.”

About CHUS

The fourth largest hospital center in the province of Quebec, the Sherbrooke University Hopital Center (CHUS) is a local, regional, and supra-regional hospital providing general healthcare services for the population of Quebec’s Eastern Townships as well as specialized care in cardiology, neurosurgery, oncology, and neonatology for the Centre-du-Québec region and parts of the Montérégie region of the province.