Varrow
Case Studies
Enabling our customers to rapidly and efficiently achieve their goals and objectives.
- Company: Chesapeake Regional Medical Center
- Client Since: 2009
Chesapeake Regional needed a trusted partner who would provide unbiased advice and a cost-effective infrastructure platform for a new HIS and EMR solution. Varrow answered the call with expertise, consulting, practicality and scalability. Leveraging VMware, Cisco and EMC; Varrow delivered the solution using our field-proven expertise.
"Varrow is a technology partner who looked out for our welfare every step of the way. I look forward to our continued relationship as CRMC grows."
The Challenge
Chesapeake Regional Medical Center (CRMC), a multi-site regional hospital system serving the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, was planning a new hospital information system that required a significant investment in additional infrastructure. The new HIS would help improve the quality of patient care while helping to keep the healthcare costs at bay. This investment included over 150 new servers along with the supporting storage and network infrastructure. CRMC had serious concerns about the initial acquisition expenditure and ongoing power and cooling costs, along with the ongoing costs and burdens of management and monitoring that the proposed infrastructure would require. There were also concerns over available space in their existing data center, as a new data center would exponentially increase the costs and project timeline.
The Solution
Varrow worked with the CRMC staff as well as the hospital application vendor, EMC, Cisco, and VMware to develop the final architecture. The number of physical servers was reduced from over 150 down to 25 VMware vSphere servers, and all storage needs were consolidated to a single EMC CLARiiON CX4-480 SAN, with multiple tiers of disk performance. This design drastically reduced the physical rack space required as well as significantly lowered the costs to power and cool the infrastructure. To allay any concerns over performance of the virtualized data center, several enhancements were made to the design such as utilizing the latest Hewlett Packard servers with the Intel Nehalem processors, EMC’s Powerpath VE for storage load balancing, and EMC solid state flash drives for the backend databases. To provide for the required I/O performance in the virtual environment, the choice was made to use Cisco’s Nexus 5000 unified fabric. This decision allowed CRMC to consolidate their storage and network fabrics using the Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) protocol. The Cisco Nexus solution greatly reduces the number of required FC and Ethernet switches while providing for a single, unified fabric for all connectivity. To compliment the Nexus platform, Varrow recommended replacing the aging Cisco 6500 core switches with Nexus 7010 platform. Application performance is further accelerated with current generation Cisco 6504 switches with Cisco ACE modules. Finally, to provide visibility, quality of service, and access control within the VMware environment, the Nexus 1000v virtual switch was implemented. This gives the CRMC network staff far greater insight in to their application workflow than is possible with VMware vSphere alone.
The Result
With the scalability of the solution combined with the cost savings resulting from the deployment of the VMware, Cisco and EMC platform, CRMC has virtually unlimited growth potential. Additional benefits such as faster recovery, selftuning performance and decreased complication makes this project a testament to the commitment that CRMC has to achieving the mission of improving the quality of life in their community. Direct cost savings is estimated at more than $800,000 just for the upfront acquisition, not to mention the ongoing cost avoidance, given the built-in scalability and simplicity.
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