Healthcare Facilities Discover Pain Relief For the Datacenter

People who work at healthcare facilities suffer from pains of their own, and the source of the pain may surprise you. It is the kind of pain that has nothing to do with the human body, and the relief cannot come from the medical staff. It’s the pain of managing an aging IT infrastructure.

IT administrators have a tough time in healthcare datacenters these days. Legacy IT systems can be difficult to manage and grow. Over time, a siloed architecture can make an infrastructure more complex, more costly, and harder to upgrade. As if that’s not challenging enough, HIPAA regulations impose stringent rules on medical databases to ensure the protection of patient information. Although products are available that can mitigate the risk of catastrophic datacenter failure and data breaches, it’s hard to know which ones will integrate smoothly into a legacy IT environment. It’s equally important that, as legacy IT is refreshed and modernized, new systems are resilient and overcome complexity and cost headaches.

Prescription for healthcare facilities: HIPPA-compliant hyperconverged solutions

But relief from datacenter pain is available – and no, you don’t need a prescription. Technology can ease the pain of legacy infrastructures for IT operations and can even mend fractured data protection strategies. Both of these benefits help keep costs – and IT operations’ blood pressure – down.

Healthcare IT professionals are discovering the benefits of deploying hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) in their datacenters and at remote sites. Hyperconverged infrastructure combines up to a dozen discrete IT infrastructure components and advanced data services into a single x86-based building block that easily scales as requirements demand and provides similar costs and experiences of public clouds.  Some hyperconverged solutions include built-in data protection and validated data security solutions as well.

A HIPAA-compliant HCI offering typically includes an array of compliance monitoring and enforcement tools, along with VM-centric management, that simplifies management of the combined solution from a single console. The hyperconverged infrastructure controls the efficient movement of VMs across datacenters. The data encryption solution allows the IT admin to key, clone, restore, and rekey VMs, instructing the system to shred old encryption keys. Cloned and restored VMs can be rekeyed as well, which means data cannot be duplicated and stolen by simply using data services. A security platform that performs encryption with zero downtime helps to increase compliance with various regulations and best practices.

Weeks Medical Center,a critical access hospital offering medical, surgical, and intensive care services, chose HPE SimpliVity powered by Intel® hyperconverged infrastructure for improved risk mitigation and HIPAA compliance. In addition to $100,000 annual cost savings, they realized backup and recovery improvements, including restoration of massive PACS (medical image) files in minutes.

Neil Medical Group provides pharmacy dispensing and consulting services to Long Term Care facilities in the US. Recently, they refreshed their legacy IT infrastructure, simplifying operations and improving data protection for critical applications. They also experienced a 25% increase in application performance with HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure, and as much as 137:1 data efficiency using always-on deduplication and compression.

Altrecht, a Netherlands-based healthcare company that treats more than 25,000 patients annually, consolidated 8 racks of legacy equipment down to two racks of hyperconverged infrastructure systems. Rapid and efficient data protection allows them to back up and recover VMs in minutes compared to hours with their previous infrastructure.

The Namibia Institute of Pathology (NIP) is the largest diagnostic pathology service provider in Namibia, handling all public health sector pathology testing and providing disease monitoring services. When it was time to refresh their IT, NIPleveraged hyperconverged infrastructureto build a private cloud to shield sensitive data. They now achieve fast, simple full backups and replication and have consolidated 40U to 6U of rack space with HPE SimpliVity. They also streamlined their IT operations and realized a 94:1 data efficiency ratio.

All of these healthcare facilities choose Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to refresh their aging infrastructure. HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged systems are helping healthcare IT teams all over the world find pain relief by simplifying their IT operations and protecting their critical data. HPE has validated HPE SimpliVity interoperability with HyTrust DataControl, a security and compliance platform for virtual machines that offers simple encryption key management. This implementation and best practices guide explains how, with HyTrust DataControl, HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure becomes a HIPAA-compliant solution that secures application data through encryption.

To learn more about how hyperconverged solutions can bring pain relief to your datacenter, download the free e-book: Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Dummies.

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About Lauren Whitehouse

^{Lauren Whitehouse is the marketing director for the Software-Defined and Cloud Group at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).  She is a serial start-up marketer with over 30 years in the software industry, joining HPE from the SimpliVity acquisition in February 2017.  Lauren brings extensive experience from a number of executive leadership roles in software development, product management, product marketing, channel marketing, and marketing communications at market-leading global enterprises. She also spent several years as an industry analyst, speaker and blogger, serving as a popular resource for IT vendors and the media, as well as a contributing writer at TechTarget on storage topics.}