vCORE Case Study
Overview
With limited resources and economic pressure to keep expenses down, a regional health-care provider approached vCORE with a specific set of needs and requirements for IT infrastructure modernization.
That included a more-reliable back-up solution that costs less to support, all-flash storage and new servers to boost flexibility, scalability and capacity, and an overall architecture that reduced the need for rack space and cut power usage in half.
Read through the case study below to learn more about how vCORE engineers tailored a best-of-breed solution to meet client objectives and boost performance while cutting costs.
The Client
The client, a regional hospital in the western United States, provides medical care for a large, rural geographic area. With limited resources, the hospital faces economic pressure to keep expenses down while maintaining service levels for a diverse patient base.
Operations include the main hospital and multiple satellite facilities, along with a mobile unit that travels across the broad service area to provide medical and dental services.
The Problem
The hospital’s IT infrastructure included an outdated back-up solution with a high support renewal, a storage capacity that struggled to keep up with growth in services.
The client desired to modernize its infrastructure to reduce overall management, shrink its footprint and better integrate with critical systems.
The goal was to provide services for today’s and future workloads while reducing the amount of time and money spent managing IT while providing predictable cost for the next five years.
The Solution
vCORE engineers leveraged best-of-breed infrastructure including cutting-edge servers, storage arrays and back-up hardware/software from Dell EMC to meet the client’s objectives with a tailored solution that included the following:
- All flash storage for block storage to simplify storage management and have applications perform at their peak capability
- Scalable solutions that allow the client to purchase the infrastructure needed today without overprovisioning and no forklift upgrades required in the future
- Zero downtime for newer generations for hardware
- Predictable operating cost after initial maintenance has expired
- Reliable and easy to manage backup solution
- Full Restful API to allow for future IT automation and orchestration
- Consolidate infrastructure and lower overall power/cooling consumption
New servers provided 20% more cores for growth along with greater efficiency. Modern storage solutions boosted memory by 15-20%, while the overall architecture reduced the required rack space while cutting power usage in half.
The Results
Over the course of five years, the client is projected to realize more than $720,000 in cost savings.
Operational benefits include:
- Increased performance and decreased latency to less than 1 ms.
- Backup time reduced by 4x.
- Eliminated performance-induced system crashes and hours-long recoveries.
- Desktops come up faster; images and applications load immediately.
- Affordable, feature-rich, all-flash storage performance.
- Ease of use, including powerful monitoring tools and analytics.
- Future flexibility to scale-up and scale-out without service interruption.
