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INDUSTRY
Healthcare
SOLUTION
- Nutanix Enterprise Cloud
- Nutanix AHV Acropolis
- Nutanix Prism
BENEFITS
- Achieved 50% faster desktop performance during peak periods
- Enabled 50% faster desktop image recomposes
- Provided 6:1 reduction in datacenter rack space requirements
- Fully fault tolerant solution delivers higher availability
APPLICATIONS
- OSCAR electronic medical records (EMR) software
- Sage Enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications
- SQL Server databases
- Geographic information systems(GIS) applications
- File and print servers
- Office productivity applications
BUSINESS BENEFITS
For Hastings Prince Edward Public Health, technology is much more than a business resource. It’s the key to bringing 150,000 people together with the care, services, and advice they need to stay healthy. The public agency offers dozens of programs and services to citizens across Eastern Ontario, Canada. After successfully migrating its EMRand other critical applications to a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)environment running on Nutanix Enterprise Cloud, Hastings wanted to extend the solution’s benefits to its server applications as well.
Nutanix has enabled us to expand our environment in a modular fashion, using a pay-as you-grow model with no impact on staff or performance. We have maintained a great level of performance, while increasing our VDI adoption rate. It has been thumbs-up all around. We have also migrated all of our production workloads on the server side to a higher performance, four-node Nutanix cluster. Spending time managing the infrastructure is time you could be spending serving the business. With Nutanix, instead of worrying about our infrastructure, I can focus on the workloads running on top of it, and how I can best add value to our organization.
- Tom Lockhart, IT Manager at Hastings Prince Edward Public Health
CHALLENGE
Hastings Prince Edward Public Health has been an innovator in desktop and application virtualization for years. To serve constituents, its healthcare staff relies on a variety of server and healthcare applications, including OSCAR open-source EMR software, SQL server databases, GIS applications, file and print servers, and other office productivity applications. When the organization faced performance and scalability issues with its existing environment, it turned to Nutanix Enterprise Cloud to enable VDI delivery of its applications.
The Nutanix environment lets Lockhart and his team support more virtual desktops than they could on the previous storage infrastructure, and desktop performance is at least 50% faster during peak periods. “I deployed Nutanix for our VDI initiative, and was thrilled with the solution,” said Lockhart. “I thought that if Nutanix could run VDI workloads with this level of performance, I would be confident in consolidating all my server workloads onto a higher performance Nutanix cluster. It was a no-brainer for me.”
SOLUTION
Zycom Technology, an IT solutions provider, has been a long-time technology partner for Hastings. Zycom first sold the concept of virtual desktop infrastructure solution to the organization, and continued to work with Hastings to build on its success. VDI use has expanded from select use cases to 90 percent of the provider’s staff.
“Since our initial deployment, we have migrated our entire environment, except for low-risk workloads, to Nutanix,” said Lockhart. “Our VDI cluster has doubled in size in terms of nodes, and VDI adoption rate has doubled as well. We have also migrated all of our production workloads on the server side to a higher-performance, four-node Nutanix cluster. We are planning to expand this cluster as well to support new initiatives like updated EMR applications, a business intelligence (BI) SQL database, or other workloads.”
Lockhart and his team are using Nutanix Prism to keep the environment running at its best, and proactively keep pace with new demands. “The Nutanix Prism interface is very simple to navigate – it is incredibly easy to find what I’m looking for and I get a lot of visibility into what’s happening,” said Lockhart. “For example, we migrated a large group of users from Windows 7 to Windows 10, but we found that our environment was not aligning with staff needs. Nutanix Prism helped us identify that issue. The metrics it provided made it easy for me to make the business case to add more VDI resources to achieve the performance we needed.”
RESULTS
When Hastings rolled out its initial first deployed its Nutanix hyperconverged environment, Lockhart and his team were impressed by 50 percent better desktop performance and faster deployment. Those benefits have held steady, even as IT has doubled the size of its solution. Extending the solution to serve more people at new sites is as simple as adding a node. “We often expand our organization to support healthcare providers at community clinics,” said Lockhart. “Now we can scale our environment with very little fuss or muss. Nutanix allows me to upgrade the environment very easily and seamlessly with no downtime.”
Best of all, Nutanix helps free up Lockhart’s IT staff from troubleshooting the infrastructure, so they can focus on delivering better healthcare. “We’re a small environment, so I have to wear a lot of IT hats,” said Lockhart. “The Nutanix solution has saved me about a day a week in administrative tasks, but the real takeaway is the fact that I don’t have to think about our infrastructure anymore. It just works, and it’s something I don’t have to worry about it.”
NEXT STEPS
Hastings Prince Edward Public Health is constantly growing and evolving, and Nutanix makes it easy for IT to stay in step with nonstop changes. “We may be amalgamating with some partner agencies as part of a healthcare restructuring initiative in Ontario,” said Lockhart. “Many of these agencies used Hastingsas a model for HCI, so we can simply tie our Nutanix environments together. We are also consideringNutanix Metro Availability to support disaster recovery.”
Like all healthcare providers in Canada, Hastings is also subject to strict healthcare privacy requirements. The organization is evaluating Xi Frame, an automated digital workspace as a service platform that supports hybrid cloud without compromising compliance. “We are mandated by two healthcare privacy acts,” said Lockhart. “We are considering adopting Xi Frame because it can support workloads on premises, rather than hosted on the cloud. Nutanix gives us the flexibility to take advantage of the elasticity of cloud, while supporting whatever framework we need for compliance.”