Healthcare
For nearly two decades, Syracuse Orthopedic Specialists (SOS) has provided a comprehensive set of orthopedic care services near Syracuse, NY and the surrounding regions. With a team of some of the best orthopedic doctors and the latest advancements in medical technology, this innovative healthcare provider focuses on helping patients get the care they need for a healthier, happier life. When its existing compute and storage equipment began nearing end of life, the provider turned to a hyperconverged infrastructure solution from Nutanix. The new solution has dramatically simplified the healthcare provider’s environment, freeing up valuable time and resources that could be better spent on innovation and creating new services.
Nutanix has helped us simplify the complexity in our network. In the past, we had to contract with outside professional services organizations to assist us in managing things like fiber channel connections between our compute and storage environments. Nutanix lets us bring everything together, and it really takes away the need for all that.
SOS provides total orthopedic care for a wide range of joint and muscle injuries, chronic musculoskeletal conditions and pain management. Its network infrastructure supports everything .
“We have approximately 600 employees at 10 sites in the region,” said Michael Cobb, CIO/COO at Syracuse Orthopedic Specialists. “IT provides the network processing and storage support for all of the applications we are running locally. We are also picking up many more cloud apps, hosted together with a number of applications.
Although the existing on-premises infrastructure solutions were meeting the company’s basic requirements, supporting devices from several different vendors was becoming time-consuming.
“Our infrastructure was becoming more complicated, especially when it came to managing upgrades and updates, so we were looking to simplify operations,” said Cobb.
Syracuse Orthopedic Specialists was looking for a modern, scalable solution that would deliver the manageability it needed, together with the performance and reliability that essential healthcare applications require. The solution would have to be fully compatible with its on-premises applications and provide support for a growing array of cloud services as well.
Syracuse Orthopedic Specialists turned to partner Meridian Technology Group, which worked with the firm to analyze several options, and recommended a Nutanix Hybrid Cloud Platform. This hyperconverged infrastructure solution enabled the provider to consolidate its separate infrastructure elements on a single, easy to manage environment.
“Deployment of the solution was very easy,” said Alan Hilliar, Systems Engineer at Syracuse Orthopedic Specialists. “We were running VMware on Nutanix, so we simply stood up the required VMs and migrated from one cluster to another. We had no issues with any of the processes.”
Nutanix provides support for some of the most important healthcare services and applications, including SQL-based Electronic Healthcare Records (EHR) and Filebound document and workflow management. Filebound supports a variety of processes, from the firm’s revenue cycles to human resource and finance records. Nutanix not only provides support for the provider’s on-premises applications, but also helps keep its cloud-based applications performing at their best.
“We had sized our Nutanix solution to support a new X-ray and imaging application,” said Hilliar. “We decided to migrate to the INFINITT Picture Archiving and Communications System (PACS), which is a cloud-based solution. We run a cache server on Nutanix to support it, with the main application residing in the cloud.”
By consolidating all of its critical processes and apps onto a single environment, Syracuse Orthopedic Specialists can more easily keep its solution up to date and running at its best, for more dependable performance and availability.
“Having multiple vendors created complexity in doing patches and upgrades, but also having one storage vendor and a different processing vendor led to a lot of finger-pointing if an issue arose,” said Cobb. “Migrating to an HCI has helped us eliminate that.”
The Nutanix Prism administrative tool gives IT instant visibility into the health of its infrastructure. Prism provides a single dashboard view of performance graphs tracking CPU, memory, and latency that are essential to maintaining performance. The tool also helps Hilliar and his team be more proactive in managing the environment.
“The Nutanix solution has definitely saved time for me,” said Hilliar. “I do regular checks every month, and the ability to go the console, see what upgrades are available, and click to install them, is a huge time-saver. Under our previous environment, we had to cross reference everything and look up possible upgrades, but Nutanix Prism kind of does all that work for us.”
To help ensure that its healthcare applications remain available even in the event of a serious outage, Syracuse Orthopedic Specialists has activated the disaster recovery (DR) feature on its Nutanix solution, to ensure business continuity if its main cluster goes down.
With its scalable Nutanix environment in place, Syracuse Orthopedic Specialists is exploring additional ways to expand its solution, improve capabilities, and save money. The provider is evaluating the Nutanix AHV Hypervisor, which combines virtualization and management with the simplicity of HCI—without the licensing fees of its VMware solution.
“We’re considering several options, and AHV is definitely one of them,” said Cobb. “We believe the solution could be more cost-effective, and its storage snapshot capabilities could help us make backups cleaner.”
Cobb and his team are looking forward to years of continued support from their new environment, and providing an exceptional service to patients well into the future.