With short wait times and fast access to a physician, a stop at SPMC’s emergency room can mean the difference between life and death for heart attack or stroke victims and people with traumatic injuries. The award-winning hospital adheres to a “national model for patient centered care” focused on quality, access and compassion.
SPMC uses data to improve patient care, notably its treatment of sepsis, cardiac and stroke sufferers. Real-time data and reporting enables the hospital to adjust its workflow to meet demand, improve regulatory compliance, and enhance patient safety.
To keep the hospital on its path of excellence, the IT department relies on Scale Computing’s HC3 system – a hyperconverged ‘datacenter-in-a-box’ that combines servers, storage, and virtualization into a single, highly available, easy-to-use and scalable platform.
Challenge
The hospital was seeking a cost-effective way to upgrade its virtualization and storage capabilities. As a heavy user of VMware, SPMC’s IT department knew the myriad benefits of virtualization but determined that an extensive VMware solution would have been both too costly and complex.
“Our vision is to be THE national model for patient centered care,” SPMC’s CEO, Renee Jensen, shared. “An integral part of that process is ensuring that our IT systems can keep up with our growing staff and patient needs. With the help of HC3, our small IT department has found the bandwidth needed to not only keep us running, but developed new programs and processes that help us move toward our vision.”
“We were looking for an affordable and easy way to scale our computing environment,” said Jeff Painter Jr., IT Manager. “We had a limited budget and a small IT department.”
After reviewing solutions from a number of vendors — notably EMC, HP, NetApp and Scale Computing — SPMC chose the Scale Computing HC3 solution.
Solution
“We were really impressed with HC3’s seamless integration of servers, storage and virtualization capabilities,” he said. “Plus, we were surprised at how easy it is to use.”
However, the big benefit for SPMC was HC3’s flawless ability to scale up without involving the IT staff in any complex work.
“When we need to grow, we simply add more nodes,” said Painter. “There is no rip and replace, no complexity and zero headaches. We can grow the environment by adding a cluster, and increasing RAM and processing power at the same time. The flexibility that HC3 provides in scaling is great.”
Painter emphasized that HC3 ticked all the hospital’s boxes for a solution that is simple, available and scalable.
SIMPLE: As HC3 requires no virtualization software to license, no external storage to buy and comes with an integrated hypervisor, it radically simplifies the infrastructure needed to keep applications running. HC3 makes the deployment and management of a highly available and scalable infrastructure as easy to manage as a single server.
“As we are a quickly growing organization with limited IT resources, HC3 allows our IT staff to easily manage the entire computing system,” said Painter. “I can manage the system remotely without having to run around to each physical machine.”
HC3 is built with the availability of a virtualized server and SAN, the scalability of a clustered infrastructure, and the simplicity of a single server.
AVAILABLE: Every virtual machine created on an HC3 system is automatically configured for high availability — meaning that in the event of hardware failure, the VMs running on the failed node will failover to the remaining nodes in the cluster automatically.
“The fact that we can lose a server and not even notice it is quite amazing and obviously very important,” said Painter.
SCALABLE: HC3 enables the hospital to pay for what they needed on day one, knowing that the system would grow alongside their virtual environment and business needs in the future. With HC3, there are no upfront costs or licensing complexities.