LARGE MIDWESTERN HOSPITAL ASSOCIATION

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1 LARGE MIDWESTERN HOSPITAL ASSOCIATION Health association accelerates cloud computing initiatives with an integrated solution from EMC ORGANIZATION OVERVIEW As an association of 200 hospitals and health systems, this large Midwestern hospital association provides members with a wide range of services including advocacy, financial services, and support related to healthcare, IHA sponsored educational programs and events, and the development of appropriate policy initiatives. ESSENTIALS Challenge To help the organization grow by journeying toward the next-generation data center Solutions EMC Celerra EMC CLARiiON FAST Suite EMC Avamar EMC RecoverPoint VMware technology including VMware View Cisco UCS platform Key benefits Accelerates cloud capabilities including SaaS and ITaaS Supports VMware View VDI deployment Virtual environment consolidates servers 70:1 Minimizes costs Auto-tiering maximizes data storage utilization Fast, daily full backups One-step recovery Up to 96 percent deduplication rate Its mission to advocate for, and support, hospitals and health systems is reinforced by core values that include a commitment to excellence, respect for the value and dignity of patients and hospital employees, and high ethical practice standards. BUILDING CLOUD FOUNDATIONS WITH EMC In 2008, the association s senior systems engineer made the strategic decision to move the association into the cloud to help the organization grow by journeying toward the nextgeneration data center. The engineer s journey began by virtualizing all servers. The association chose EMC, VMware, and Cisco technology to support the organization s move into the cloud. EMC Celerra offers the association the versatility that we needed because we can have CIFS, NFS, and file level deduplication, says the engineer. Additionally, we use the underlying EMC CLARiiON CX platform, which works as the core for our infrastructure. Over the two years in which we ve evolved, we ve gone from a Dell solution to what we have now: we have EMC; we have Cisco as our UCS platform; and we also have VMware as our hypervisor of choice. From there, the association branched off to deploy cloud-related capabilities such as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), which is already 85 percent implemented. On the server side, we are 100 percent virtualized, the engineer adds. What we have today is a full virtual server infrastructure. ROLLING OUT VIRTUAL APPLICATIONS When asked which applications the hospital association has virtualized, the engineer states, We started with the low hanging fruit. We first picked all of our smaller application servers and virtualized those. In the process, the engineer explains how they also reduced their footprint for Microsoft licensing by determining what appliances were available that could alleviate the issues that they had in this area. Customer Profile

2 Other applications that we have virtualized include SQL, and we re now a SQL 2005/2008 shop, he says. We use EMC s FAST technology to help support that. We started out with FAST Cache. Noting how effective it was, we decided to go with the entire FAST Suite. Now we can do auto-tiering and thin provisioning. We incorporate all of those technologies into our EMC solution. VIRTUALIZATION AND CONSOLIDATION TO MAXIMIZE UTILIZATION The engineer also explains how virtualization has resulted in significant cost savings by maximizing infrastructure utilization. With our old solution we had 10 racks of servers with one box per application, he says. After that we consolidated and virtualized. As mentioned, we started out with a Dell chassis with seven blades in it. We would get about a 22 to 1 ratio between physical servers and the virtual machines. Now that we ve moved to the UCS, we re hitting about 70 to 1 which is very nice. We have also consolidated our virtual environment, he adds. We used to have a separate cluster for production servers and another cluster to support desktops. With UCS, what we have been able to do is combine those clusters. This way we get better utilization out of our hardware resources. We have created a huge resource pool and have been able to completely consolidate our virtual environment. VMWARE VIEW: EMPOWERING DESKTOP VIRTUALIZATION AND MANAGEMENT The hospital association has been using VMware View for desktop virtualization and management since the 4.0 release. As each generation of VMware View is released, it offers even better features, the engineer says. It s actually at the point where we can sell this as a service. First, we brought it in-house. We virtualized the desktops of our own employees and solicited feedback from them. The fact that we can take a physical desktop that uses a 500 watt power supply, and now our employees are using either a 6.5 watt or 5 watt power supply means that we re significantly cutting our CAPEX costs. We re moving toward our initiative of providing green solutions. The engineer notes that with all the features that the organization has through VMware View, he has also been able to incorporate a bring your own device strategy to this IT offering. Today, users of the association s virtual desktop capabilities have a choice and can use leading devices such as ipads and iphones within the virtual desktop infrastructure solution by connnecting to the network through VMware View. Ever since we adopted VMware View, we have been leveraging benefits not only for our company, but for our customers, he states. We have been able to expand what we offer our customers thereby adding significant perks for those who use our solution. For instance, we added a DVD player. This gives our customers another reason to stick with us. CLOUD PROVIDING FLEXIBILITY TO MEET CUSTOMER NEEDS The hospital association s move to cloud technologies has provided the organization with a high level of flexibility, offering customers services that meet their exact needs. Cloud gives us the ability to be flexible, says the engineer. If you want Windows XP it s there. If you want Windows 7, it s also there. You don t have to upgrade anything. All we have to do is give our customers additional resources. All customer data is now secured in our centralized data storage location. Customers don t have to worry about sensitive data being located on individual hard drives.

3 Also, if a user needs more processing power we re able to quickly provide that, he adds. In the physical world, you would have to go to their desktop and give them more physical resources. With cloud, it s all managed in the back-end. It keeps our help desk and support people from having to go out into the field, which significantly lowers costs and increases productivity. The engineer also notes that cloud strategies provide a variety of other capabilities to meet critical association member needs. I was on the white board one day, thinking about how we could apply cloud to our members, he explains. I remember hearing from one of our solutions sales people that there are member hospitals with ten beds that rely on only two servers to meet their IT needs. I began to think: What do they do for backup solutions? What do they do for disaster recovery? How do they manage their phone system? What we realized is that we have everything in-house, as part of our cloud capability, to meet the critical needs of our members. Today the hospital association can offer a private MPLS cloud, which means that any of their members can quickly connect to the its cloud. The key phrases for our members today are Software as a Service and IT as a Service, says the engineer. We can provide anything from server and desktop virtualization, to backup by using our EMC Avamar solution. We can even offer phone services through our Cisco VOIP solution. The sky s the limit. ACCELERATING CLOUD SERVICES The systems engineer notes that because of his decision to journey to the cloud, the hospital association is now well positioned to provide cloud services to its members. EMC storage capabilities form the foundation for our move to cloud, and they are a central piece of our cloud solution, he says. With EMC and VMware together, we re able to efficiently extend cloud offerings to association members. The reason we went with EMC in the first place is that its solutions are not offered on a one size fits all basis. Rather, EMC offers a modular approach. You can start with one piece now and add onto it later. We were able to start out with just the SAN solution. From there we added on software such as the FAST Suite. Then, for backup, we were able to add on another module, Avamar. Then we looked at our business continuity requirements and chose EMC RecoverPoint. I look at it this way, our ideal IT cloud solution is a puzzle, he adds. EMC gives us all the pieces we need to create the picture of cloud we want to create. There are many EMC pieces that we can intermingle, and that come together to give us an effective private cloud. Recently, the association reassessed EMC competitors to determine if he had made the right choice. We stick with EMC because it is an innovator, the engineer says. The company continually releases new products. The vision that EMC has with regard to cloud follows my vision of cloud and the goals for the hospital association. FAST FOR EFFECTIVE TIERING STRATEGIES FAST Suite is valued for its many features. Initially, the association adopted FAST Cache to eliminate bottlenecks. However, the engineer noticed that the full FAST Suite gave him significantly more capabilities. We decided to go with Enterprise Flash drives, the engineer explains. This is our platinum drive. Then we have our Fibre Channel drives, as well as our 1 and 2 TB SATA drives. What we have done is taken that technology and incorporated it into our solutions for our claims management. When customers open a claim, you want a quick response. FAST

4 tiers the data so you initially get top priority, and the data is on the Flash drives. With older solutions, it used to take up to seven seconds to pull up the claim. Now with FAST, it takes about a second. FAST enables our claims team to provide a more efficient service to the people that they serve. Over a 30 day period, the data is then automatically pushed down to the Fibre Channel drives, or even SATA drives, which is where we push all of our archive data after 90 days, he adds. With regard to large image files, we also push that down to our low-cost data storage infrastructure. Automated storage tiering also enables the association to meet ongoing workload requirements. We obviously don t want to move data during our backup window, so what FAST does is automatically allow for that backup schedule, he says. During backups, we have a lot of I/O, but when the backup is completed, FAST kicks back in. By having this auto-scheduler, we don t have to worry about it. With FAST you can do it at block level. It s amazing. Before we implemented FAST, we would have had to physically go through a manual process, he adds. We would have to sit there for a couple of hours to analyze our needs. Now that we ve implemented the FAST solution, it automatically moves the data to where it needs to be. By having the whole FAST Suite, we re able to take one gig chunk data sizes and automatically move them to less expensive storage. This provides exceptional data storage utilization, resulting in significant cost savings. In addition, specific applications have been examined to determine how these could best utilize scarce storage resources. Even if it s a tier-one application, the entire application doesn t have to rest on tier-one storage, explains the engineer. We take apart our applications. We ll say, Oh, this part of the application can reside on a Flash drive, but other parts of the application can sit on Fibre Channel or even SATA drives. We have been able to effectively and efficiently migrate data to where it needs to be. The engineer also notes that FAST facilitates the journey to cloud by providing data tiering not only at the primary data center but also at the organization s disaster recovery site. He explains that FAST removes pain points such as boot storms and I/O peaks. FAST buffers those moments when data spikes on storage, and alleviates the pain points that cloud customers might see. EMC AVAMAR FOR RELIABLE DATA BACKUP The engineer states that one of the reasons he went with Avamar was because it is ideal for virtualized environments. The Avamar grids initially supported a mix of physical and virtual servers but the end state was all virtual machines after we phased out the physical servers, he explains. We back up 34 TB of data on the grids and use a combination of agent-based backups as well as image level backups. Our legacy backup solution was tape. In those days, a full backup could take 36 hours. Avamar significantly decreases our backup window for both physical and virtual servers. With Avamar, daily full backups are 90 percent faster and take under two hours. Recoveries are also much faster because you re pulling data from disks rather than from tape. Our RTO has significantly decreased from 24 hours to 20 minutes. On one 6 TB backup, we see 96 percent deduplication rates. That s just amazing. One thing our CIO always says is, Where s the pixie dust? He just wants to know how this works to dedupe that much data with this technology. I know it s due to the development guys over at EMC.

5 The hospital association s decision to go with Avamar was reinforced by an unlikely source: an EMC competitor. We were approached by EMC competitor NetApp, he says. When they discovered that we were using Avamar, they stated, We won t even touch that. It s the best solution out there. Avamar is the de facto standard for virtualized backup solutions. It was nice to hear that from a competing vendor. Avamar also provides a significant cloud-based capability to The hospital association s members. Members can use our Avamar solution to back up and restore their data, the engineer explains. They can go in through their portal, choose the file that might need to be restored, and restore it quickly without any intervention from our support team. This helps us to build our cloud strategy because Avamar gives us a cloud-based solution for that. We are now cloud enablers. We encourage our members to come to us with their challenges so that we can provide a relevant solution. EMC, VMware, and Cisco together, with all of those pieces of the puzzle, allow us to push out cloud solutions to our members and the market much quicker than our competitors. Senior Systems Engineer, Large Midwestern Hospital Association EMC RECOVERPOINT A VITAL INSURANCE POLICY EMC RecoverPoint is used in addition to Avamar for backup. The difference between the two is this: Avamar s RTO is not as granular as the RecoverPoint solution, says the engineer. What we do is take both of those solutions to complement each other. With RecoverPoint, we can go back literally to the second if not milli-second, right before the virus happened, and restore that data, he states. RecoverPoint creates a quicker RTO and RPO. It allows us to control both of these. EMC also offers three different RecoverPoint solutions: you can do local replication, remote replication, or a combination of local and remote. We re given every flavor under the sun that we d ever need. Contact Us To learn more about how EMC products, services, and solutions can help solve your business and IT challenges, contact your local representative or authorized reseller or visit us at We just love EMC s RecoverPoint solution, he adds. It s our insurance policy. We re able to take all of our data and journal it. Before we went with EMC, our backup and recovery RTO and RPO were significantly longer. If we had an incident, we d have to say to our users, We ll get your data back within a week, which was not the most acceptable answer but that s what the product at the time would allow. The insurance that you get by using RecoverPoint is limitless. In the case of an incident, RecoverPoint allows us to recover more data, quickly, rather than lose that critical data. EMC 2, EMC, the EMC logo, Avamar, Celerra, CLARiiON, and CX are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. VMware and VMware View are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners. Copyright 2012 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Published in the USA. 01/12 Customer Profile H EMC Corporation Hopkinton, Massachusetts In North America