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Healthcare institutions choose SimpliVity to consolidate data centers, improve data protection, and meet regulatory compliance

WESTBOROUGH, Massachusetts – December 13, 2016—SimpliVity, a hyperconverged infrastructure leader powering the world’s most efficient and resilient data centers, today announced that its OmniStack hyperconverged infrastructure platform supports Epic Hyperspace in virtual desktop environments. SimpliVity has invested heavily in creating a hyperconverged platform for VDI that delivers a superior user experience that is simple, scalable, and manageable for IT – all while containing and reducing capital and operational expenses. This latest support delivers a simple way for healthcare institutions to improve efficiency while meeting the stringent performance requirements of end-users.

As one of the leading application providers for the healthcare industry, Epic supports 190 million patients around the globe with electronic records. The SimpliVity solution for Epic Hyperspace features an unmatched user experience, scale-out architecture, ultra-fast desktop provisioning, simplified management, and a choice of VDI platform.

“Epic Hyperspace is a powerful application used by healthcare institutions all over the world,” said Jesse St. Laurent, vice president of product strategy, SimpliVity. “All data center functions are mission-critical in a healthcare environment. Patients, doctors, and healthcare providers can’t afford to have operations be slowed or stalled because of an IT problem or a poor desktop experience. SimpliVity’s support for Epic and other mission-critical applications is incredibly important because the stakes are so high at healthcare institutions, and these organizations require predictably high performance to execute their jobs on a day-to-day basis.”

Healthcare institutions all across the world have already witnessed the advantages of SimpliVity’s unique capabilities firsthand. Organizations such as Synernet Maine Health, Neil Medical Group, Penobscot Community Health Care, Weeks Medical Center, and Namibia Institute of Pathology, have deployed SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure and are benefiting from the improved operational efficiency, increased data efficiency, and reduced total cost of ownership the solution delivers.

Synernet Maine Health Revolutionizes its Data Center

Dealing with a costly and complex mix of servers and storage arrays, Synernet Maine Health was finding it difficult to scale its environment. To avoid any further investments in legacy infrastructure, Synernet began investigating alternative options for its next-generation data center. After considering a number of options, including hyperconverged and converged offerings, the outsourced provider of administrative services for the healthcare industry chose SimpliVity as its data center solution. Synernet was able to eliminate IT sprawl while driving out cost and complexity with SimpliVity and is now able to provide peak and predictable performance for its mission-critical applications such as Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, IIS servers, and Citrix XenApp.

“The SimpliVity solution was just so unique and more complete than the other options we were exploring. It’s something we can use for every workload, all the way up to our most business-critical workloads,” said Michael Michaud, senior director information technology, Synernet. “SimpliVity is a company we feel very comfortable putting our trust in as they have an outstanding team. Our relationship with SimpliVity is a true partnership. They know about our business, they care about our business, and they want to keep our business. Vendors are a dime a dozen. Partners are hard to come by.”

Neil Medical Group Achieves True Business Continuity

Neil Medical Group, a long-term-care pharmacy services provider and medical supply distributor, found its legacy infrastructure had become performance-constrained as it grew older. In addition to the problem of meeting increased capacity, the IT team found that use of tape backups was inefficient and incapable of providing true business continuity in the case of a disaster. With the outdated legacy infrastructure no longer an option, Neil Medical Group began exploring solutions that offered a data-center-in-a-box approach. As the only hyperconverged vendor to offer built-in data protection, SimpliVity was a perfect fit for Neil Medical Group. With SimpliVity, the healthcare institution has realized seamless operations and drastically improved data center efficiency.

“The hyperconverged solutions were immediately attractive to our IT team, but we found that many of them were lacking in key areas, mainly in their ability to safeguard company data,” said Chad Benfield, director of IT, Neil Medical Group. “It was like we found the missing piece when we evaluated SimpliVity because it was clear that data protection was a core feature of the solution. Now, if we find ourselves in a disaster scenario, we don’t have to worry about our mission-critical applications because SimpliVity enables us to have a business continuity plan that we can count on no matter the circumstances.”

Penobscot Community Health Care Improves Backup and Recovery Operations

The largest and most comprehensive federally qualified health center in Maine, Penobscot Community Health Care was exploring various options in order to refresh its legacy IT infrastructure, improve its disaster recovery stature, and increase its system availability. After vetting a number of vendors, the organization decided to replace its legacy multivendor IT environment with SimpliVity. Post-implementation, Penobscot Community Health Care has been able to streamline backup and recovery functions, expedite system administration, and ensure high performance and availability for mission-critical applications and core IT services.

“Backup and recovery operations used to be a real struggle with our previous solution. We were waiting upwards of 12 hours for local backups to complete. And waiting on backups for our mission-critical applications had a slowing effect on the entire IT team,” said Jason Lewis, director of IT infrastructure and security, Penobscot Community Health Care. “Now, with SimpliVity, I can do a remote backup of a one terabyte SQL app and it only takes one minute. It’s been a night and day difference and this kind of improvement is helping our team do more with the time we have available.”

Weeks Medical Center Saves on Expenses While Improving Performance

Located in northern New Hampshire, Weeks Medical Center was looking to replace its fragmented and quickly deteriorating legacy IT systems. The healthcare provider’s infrastructure was struggling to meet the demanding recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) windows necessary to ensure HIPAA compliance. During the technology refresh process, Weeks Medical Center came across SimpliVity and was impressed by not only the solution’s ability to meet the required RPOs and RTOs, but the improved performance that the center was able to achieve because of SimpliVity’s data efficiency capabilities.

“The performance of our SimpliVity OmniCubes has been incredible. Our ability to roll out and upgrade applications has been much improved with SimpliVity because the system is so simple to manage,” said Darrell Bodnar, director of information services, Weeks Medical Center. “In addition, we have been able to save big both from capital and operational expenditure perspectives. Our IT team loves the performance of SimpliVity and our CFO appreciates the financial benefits.”

Namibia Institute of Pathology Regains Control of its IT

With all IT operations outsourced, Namibia Institute of Pathology (NIP) Limited found that it wasn’t able to achieve the agility or scalability it required to reliably provide IT services to its 450 employees and 40 labs. As the largest diagnostic pathology service provider in the country, NIP wanted more control of its IT operations so it could better aid the private and public health sectors it assisted with testing and disease monitoring services. NIP chose SimpliVity as its data center solution because of the ease of management and simplicity of the platform as it need to migrate from the outsourced site to an in-house environment and needed to do so with the team in place on a strict budget that didn’t include specialists or outside consultants. With SimpliVity, NIP noticed the benefits almost immediately, consolidating from 40U of rack space down to just 6U and realizing a data efficiency ratio of 94:1. Furthermore, SimpliVity provided the healthcare organization with critical disaster recovery and offsite replication capabilities that it was lacking prior to deploying hyperconverged infrastructure.

“We have many sites under the banner of NIP and all of them need to have data protected and available in the case of a disaster. Not only has SimpliVity provided us with these abilities, but they are also very easy to manage,” said Valerie Garises, chief technology officer, Namibia Institute of Pathology. “Our core team of IT generalists can handle all operations from a single interface for our entire SimpliVity implementation across the country. This simplicity and ease of use was exactly what we were looking for and was exactly what we achieved with SimpliVity.”