If you are an IT professional, you are most likely familiar with at least the term “hyperconvergence” or “hyperconverged infrastructure”. You are also undoubtedly aware of cloud technology and some of the options for public, private, and hybrid cloud. Still, this discussion merits a brief review of private cloud before delving into how hyperconvergence fits into the picture.

What is a Private Cloud?

The basic premise behind cloud technology is an abstraction of the management of VMs from the underlying hardware infrastructure. In a public cloud, the infrastructure is owned and hosted by someone else, making it completely transparent. In a private cloud, you own the infrastructure and still need to manage it, but the cloud management layer simplifies day-to-day operation of VMs compared to traditional virtualization.

Traditional virtualization is complicated by managing hypervisors running on individual virtual hosts and managing storage across hosts. When managing a single virtual host, VM creation and management is fairly simple. In a private cloud, you still have that underlying infrastructure of multiple hosts, hypervisors, and storage, but the cloud layer provides the same simple management experience of a single host but spread across the whole data center infrastructure.

Many organizations who are thinking of implementing private cloud are also thinking of implementing public cloud, creating a hybrid cloud consisting of both public and privately hosted resources. Public cloud offers added benefits for pay-per-use elasticity for seasonal business demands and cloud-based applications for productivity.

Why Not Put Everything in Public Cloud?

Many organizations have sensitive data that they prefer to keep onsite or are required to do so by regulation. Maintaining data onsite can provide greater control and security than keeping it in the hands of a third party. For these organizations, private cloud is preferable to public cloud.

Some organizations require continuous data access for business operations and prefer not to risk interruption due to internet connectivity issues. Maintaining systems and data onsite allows these organizations to have more control over their business operations and maintain productivity. For these organizations, private cloud is preferable to public cloud.

Some organizations prefer the Capex model of private cloud vs. the Opex model of public cloud. When done well, owning and managing infrastructure can be less expensive than paying someone else for hosting. The costs can be more predictable for onsite implementation, making it easier to budget. Private cloud is preferable for these organizations.

How does Hyperconvergence Fit as a Private Cloud?

For all intents and purposes, hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) offers the same or better experience as a traditional private cloud. You could even go so far as to say it is the next generation of private cloud because it improves on some of the shortcomings of traditional private clouds. The simplicity of managing VMs in HCI is the same as traditional private clouds and brings an even simpler approach to managing the underlying hardware.

HCI is a way of combining the elements of traditional virtualization (servers, storage, and hypervisor) into a single appliance-based solution. With traditional virtualization, you were tasked with integrating these elements from multiple vendors into to working infrastructure and dealing with any incompatibilities and managing with multiple console, etc. HCI is a virtualization solution that has all of these elements pre-integrated into more or less a turnkey appliance. There should be no need to configure any storage, configure any hypervisor installs on host servers, or manage through more than a single interface.

Not all HCI vendors are equal and some rely on third party hypervisors so there are still elements of multi-vendor management, but true HCI solutions own the whole hardware and virtualization stack, providing the same experience as a private cloud. Users are able to focus on creating and managing VMs rather than worrying about the underlying infrastructure.

With the appliance-based approached, hyperconvergence is even easier to scale out than traditional private clouds or even the cloud-in-a-box solutions that also provide some levels of pre-integration. HCI scalability should be as easy as plugging in a new appliance node to a network and telling it to join an existing HCI cluster of appliance nodes.

HCI is generally more accessible and affordable than traditional private clouds or cloud-in-a-box solutions because it can start and then scale out from very small implementations without any added complexity. Small to midmarket organizations who experienced sticker shock at the acquisition and implementation costs of private clouds will likely find the costs and cost benefits of HCI much more appealing.

Summary

Private cloud is a great idea for any organization whose goals include the control and security of onsite infrastructure and simplicity of day-to-day VM management. These organizations should be looking to hyperconverged infrastructure as a private cloud option to achieve those goals vs traditional private cloud or cloud-in-a-box options.

Thinking outside the box. Paradigm shift. Innovation. As tired as these words and phrases are, they are ideas that we still strive to embody in technology development. But what happens when persons or companies actually embrace these ideas in principle and create solutions that don’t fit into the industry molds?

At Scale Computing, we challenged the traditional thinking on infrastructure design and architecture by putting forward a solution based on the idea that IT infrastructure should be so simple that anyone could manage it, with any level of experience. This idea goes against decades of IT managers being put through weeks of training and certification to manage servers, storage, and most recently, virtualization. Our idea is that infrastructure should not need multiple control panels filled with nerd knobs that must be monitored ad nauseam, but that the expertise of IT administrators should be focused on applications and business processes.

Our solution, the HC3 virtualization platform, targets midmarket customers because that is where the complexity of infrastructure architecture hits administrators the hardest. In the larger enterprise IT departments, there can be multiple teams dedicated to the different silos of infrastructure maintenance and management but in the midmarket there can be as little as one administrator in charge of infrastructure. Our founders are former IT administrators who understand the challenges and pains of managing infrastructure.

Very simply, we want to eliminate complexity from infrastructure in IT where it causes the most disruption. Complexity adds a number of costs including downtime due to failure, training and consulting fees for expertise, and extra labor costs for implementation, management, and maintenance. In order to maximize the benefit of simplicity for our target market, we specifically designed our solution without the extra complexity required by larger enterprise organizations. The result is a simple hardware and virtualization platform that can be implemented with running VMs in under an hour, is fully redundant and resilient against hardware failures, virtually eliminates both planned and unplanned downtime, and can be scaled out quickly and easily. Basically, you get a nearly turnkey infrastructure that you rarely have to manage.

This whole idea seems very straightforward to us here at Scale Computing and our customers certainly seem to get it. As for the rest of the industry, including the analysts, our focus on the midmarket seems to be viewed as a liability. We purposefully do not have all of the features and complexity of solutions that target the larger enterprise customers. The HC3 platform does not scale out to the same level as other solutions that target the larger enterprise. We do not support VMware with the specific goal of not burdening our customers with third party hypervisor licensing. We include the hypervisor at no additional charge.

We are different for a reason, but to the analysts those differences do not line up with the checklists they have developed over the years of looking at enterprise solutions. The simplicity of the HC3 does not equate with analysts as visionary and forward thinking because of their enterprise focus when it comes to IT infrastructure. We’ll probably never find favor with analyst reviews unless we sell into a Fortune 500 customer, and that just isn’t on our horizon. Instead we’ll keep focusing on the solution we provide for the midmarket to simplify infrastructure, disaster recovery, VDI, and distributed enterprise.

Are we an underdog in our market? Maybe. But you could probably say the same about the companies we target with our solutions. They aren’t the industry giants, but rather the smaller guys who are driving local economic growth, who are nimble and innovative like we are, and who appreciate the value of a solution that actually solves the real problems that have plagued IT departments for decades. It’s not easy being different but no one said starting an IT revolution would be easy.

We're thrilled that Scale Computing has made the shortlist for the DCS Awards "Data Centre Management Project of the Year." The DCS awards are designed to reward the product designers, manufacturers, suppliers and providers operating in data centre arena.

Please take a moment to vote for Scale Computing for "Date Centre Management Project of the Year"!

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Everyone in IT seems to have horror stories of failed backups, no backups, backups that were so old as to be useless. Let's celebrate Backup Day with some stories of your own disasters!

Wanted to share an article from MarketWire this week on Scale Computing's HC3 Hits the Right Note for Canadian Musical Instrument Retailer Chain

"Rather than having to buy separate servers and storage, virtualization software and management tools, and then having to network all these components together to achieve a highly available infrastructure, organizations can instead deploy a single clustered HC3 hyperconverged platform to achieve the same results with greater benefits," said Jeff Ready, CEO and co-founder of Scale Computing. "We are pleased that Long & McQuade was able to reduce the complexity, management, and cost of their aging infrastructure by implementing a complete 'datacenter in a box' that provides the performance and reliability that they wanted to be combined with the simplicity they needed."

HUGE news! You can supercharge your HC3 cluster with a flash storage retrofit! We're hosting a webinar on April 19th at 3:00 PM (EDT) specifically to tell you all about it. In this webinar we will talk about the HC3 Flash Retrofit Service to drastically improve storage I/O. Don't miss the opportunity to learn more about HC3 flash retrofit so you can schedule your retrofit before it is gone.

Register to learn more.

Big day in HC articles, so providing a round up...

CIO Review has a short article on The Need for HCI in Today's Business Environment which mainly talks about the benefits in scaling, flexibility and agility. All great reasons to consider HCI.

City governments face unique unique IT challenges, supporting a number of departments ranging from emergency services to parks and recreation. With limited budgets, these organizations look at technology to reduce the costs of the services they provide. Hyperconverged infrastructure is a great fit for city governments because it not only can be implemented at a low cost, but the cost savings continues through reduced operational and management costs.

But don’t just take it from us. These three videos let our customers speak for themselves about HC3 hyperconverged infrastructure.

Youtube Video

HC3 is a great choice for any IT organization looking to modernize for simplicity, scalability, availability, and disaster recovery. Our customer’s success is our success at Scale Computing. We want to help you be successful too. Let us know how we can help.

City governments face unique unique IT challenges, supporting a number of departments ranging from emergency services to parks and recreation. With limited budgets, these organizations look at technology to reduce the costs of the services they provide. Hyperconverged infrastructure is a great fit for city governments because it not only can be implemented at a low cost, but the cost savings continues through reduced operational and management costs.

But don’t just take it from us. These three videos let our customers speak for themselves about HC3 hyperconverged infrastructure.

Youtube Video

HC3 is a great choice for any IT organization looking to modernize for simplicity, scalability, availability, and disaster recovery. Our customer’s success is our success at Scale Computing. We want to help you be successful too. Let us know how we can help.

Information Age just had a great interview with Scale's founder and CEO Jeff Ready on the "Industry Perspective on the Evolution of Storage."

Jeff Ready, CEO and co-founder of Scale Computing - the only remaining privately held and independent hyperconvergence storage company - discusses hyperconvergence infrastructure and the evolving storage industry with Information Age

Jeff talks a little about the history of the company, the market and where things are going in the future.

CRN takes a look at who the big names are in the hyperconvergence space in the first quarter of 2017 in a short slideshow of the who's who of the top players. Of course, Scale makes the list.

Youtube Video

Manufacturing is at the heart of any economy. The industrial revolution continues to roll forward with continued innovation and automation. The role of IT in manufacturing is increasing in every aspect of manufacturing from design to shipping. Manufacturers require reliable, powerful IT infrastructure systems to implement and maintain efficient manufacturing operations.

Scale Computing’s HC3 hyperconverged infrastructure solution is ideal for manufacturing companies that need powerful IT infrastructure without complexity. Complexity equals cost in IT and the added cost of complexity from traditional IT solutions drives up manufacturing costs. HC3 makes IT infrastructure simple, scalable, highly available, and affordable. In order for manufacturers to remain competitive in modern global markets, they need modern IT infrastructure solutions like HC3.

KIB Electronics is just one manufacturer that has chosen HC3 for IT infrastructure.

Whether it is industry specific applications like ERP and CAD, or general IT applications like messaging, finance, CRM, and office tools, HC3 is a flexible, scalable, and easy-to-use platform that supports them all. HC3 is modern infrastructure for modern manufacturing.

https://www.scalecomputing.com/case_studies/penlon/

"With Scale we have effectively been able to build a data centre in a server room, without cloud based services. The technology provides servers, storage and virtualisation in one solution with complete transparency." - Tony Serratore, IT Manager

Medical Manufacturing Success Story: Penlon

Key Challenges

• Existing solution was difficult and complex to manage
• Inability to easily migrate data
• The legacy solution was outdated and updates were proving difficult
• No ability to scale out
• Concerns over the reliability of business continuity

Scale Computing Solution

Penlon selected Scale Computing’s HC3 cluster, to support over 40 virtual machines.

Business Benefits

• No licensing costs
• Improved data centre capabilities
• Dramatically reduced time management
• Added ability to scale out the IT infrastructure and plan IT budgets
• Reduction in RPO and RTO
• Complete business continuity for the IT environment

Penlon is a leading medical device manufacturing company, based in Abingdon. Established in 1943, the company has a long-standing reputation for quality and service within the medical industry for manufacturing and distributing products and systems for anesthesia, intubation, oxygen therapy and suction. Penlon operates internationally, with a presence in over 90 countries, spanning across Europe, North America, Middle East and Asia.

As a traditional medical manufacturing company, Penlon constantly reviews its product design, manufacturing processes and IT systems. As part of this Penlon looked to review its IT systems in order to deliver on two main objectives; simplified management and business continuity.

Having previously moved to virtualisation in order to save time and to create a more streamlined and enhanced IT environment, Penlon wanted to simplify the management and complexity of its infrastructure whilst guaranteeing business continuity for its customers.

IT Challenges

Penlon had been previously relying on a traditional VMware environment, but over time it was proving too complex and difficult to manage. In particular, the complexity of the system meant that Penlon struggled to migrate data and install updates. Without regular updates the company was left vulnerable to downtime and costly outages, as there was no way to ensure they had the most up to date environment. Tony Serratore, IT Manager, at Penlon commented, “The systems were vastly difficult to manage and when it came to updates we had to ensure everything was in sync. If the system seemed to be working we would not even think about installing upgrades as it was too complex and came with risks. But this wasn’t a long term solution.”

Not only was the existing VMware environment difficult to update, but the system was high maintenance. The IT team would have to allocate resources to ensure its smooth running, costing them both time and money. “The choice was to either stay with our current system running the risk of downtime or we could look for a new solution that was simple, cost effective, and easy to use,” explained Serratore.
Identifying the key requirements

Of paramount importance, not just to the IT team but to the company, was the need to guarantee continuity. Penlon also wanted the added ability to scale, adding capacity as and when needed. Serratore commented, “As an international company Penlon is constantly looking to expand its business. However, planning budgets for IT infrastructure ahead can be difficult. We wanted a solution which would work with us and support our growing business, offering the flexibility and agility we needed.”

Proving the concept

After evaluating the market and considering a number of other vendors such as Simplivity, Penlon opted for the Scale Solution. The company was introduced to Scale Computing through reseller NAS UK and opted for a two week Proof of Concept (POC) of the Scale Computing hyperconverged HC3 cluster. Serratore explained, “After registering our interest, we received a POC product within two days. Not only were we impressed with the technology but we felt Scale Computing would value us as a customer if we made that investment.”

After running a successful POC, Penlon opted for the HC 4000 and HC 1000 cluster, which offered disaster recovery, high availability, cloning, replication and snapshots providing complete business continuity.

Enjoying scalability, simplified management and business continuity

The HC3 clusters dramatically reduced management time, allowing the IT department to focus on other challenges rather than IT infrastructure. In addition, the technology offered scale-out architecture providing Penlon the room to expand. Serratore noted, “The Scale solution fits perfectly with our IT roadmap as we can add capacity as and when needed. We don’t need to over provision and can simply expand our environment when needed. With Scale we can align IT strategy with business growth.”

“After implementing Scale, we reduced our management time by hours. Previously we would have spent time managing our VMware environment but the Scale solution is so easy to use we have been able to dramatically reduce management time,” continued Serratore. “Our RPO and RTO dramatically reduced from three days to a matter of minutes. We can now use this time to focus on other IT priorities making a real difference to the business.”

“With Scale we have effectively been able to build a data centre in a server room, without cloud based services. The technology provides servers, storage and virtualisation in one solution with complete transparency,” concluded Serratore.

Nothing specific to Scale here, but interesting info on the hyperconverged world as it sits in the first half of 2017. Of particular note is the measurement that 40% of all companies are now on hyperconvergence and Dell EMC has now overtaken Nutanix as the large player in the HCI market.

http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/How-hyper-convergence-is-changing-the-shape-of-IT

IT is an arena for problem solvers and innovators. As much as every IT administrator may be looked at as an all-knowing demigod of technology, we know that many of those super powers come from sources like web research and tech support hotlines. Good technical customer support from vendors can be the greatest asset an IT administrator has for dealing with any problem, great or small.

From initial implementation to disaster recovery, good support can be the difference in you being a hero or a villain in the eyes of your bosses. Having help only a phone call away can save you both time and money when it comes to finishing your projects on time and within budget. Without good support, you are subject to delays, finger-pointing, increased project costs, and it may even put your own job in jeopardy.

At Scale Computing, we think support is as valuable and as important as our products, maybe even more valuable. Even though we design our products for simplicity, scalability, and high availability to make them easy to use for anyone, we believe you should get the best support when you do need it. We have a #bestever philosophy of making each interaction with our support team the best ever for each customer.

I could go on and on about why our support is the best about why we have a Net Promoter Score of 87 for our support. Instead, I am going to let some of our customer quotes from our TechValidate surveys speak for themselves.

These are just a few of the great quotes we have gotten from our customers. This kind of feedback is why we keep working hard to provide that #bestever support our customers have come to expect from Scale Computing.

When it comes to IT, healthcare organizations face many of the same challenge as any other organization including limited budgets and scalability. Healthcare organizations also face challenges related to storing, managing, and protecting critical patient data and research data and keeping systems available to handle critical care.

Healthcare organizations of all types have been choosing HC3 hyperconverged infrastructure from Scale Computing to serve their IT infrastructure needs. HC3 offers simplicity, scalability, availability, and affordability to organizations who need to streamline operations with a reliable solution. Whether a healthcare organization is specialized in emergency services, mental health, medical imaging, research, or any other aspect of care, HC3 is a smart choice.

I'll be showcasing a handful of healthcare organizations that run on Scale's HC3 platform.

https://www.scalecomputing.com/case_studies/healthcare-success-story-summit-pacific-medical-center/

"As we are a quickly growing organization with limited IT resources, HC3 allows our IT staff to easily manage the entire computing system.” Jeff Painter, IT Manager

Elma, Washington. IT Staff of three.

Solution: 4 Node HC3 1000, 128GB RAM, 4x Quad Core Intel CPUs, 16 SATA Drives, 8x GigE

Healthcare Success Story: Summit Pacific Medical Center

Fast Facts

Summit Pacific Medical Center (SPMC) is a rural hospital about 100 miles south of Seattle, Wash. The hospital provides 24-hour emergency services and was recently upgraded to a level IV Trauma Center meaning they have demonstrated an ability to provide advanced trauma life support prior to stabilize critically injured patients prior to being transferred to a higher level trauma center. SPMC also provides the community with urgent care services seven days a week, a skilled nursing and rehabilitation program, hepatitis C management, therapy services, a full service laboratory and diagnostic imaging department as well as three primary care clinics.

Introduction

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’s vision is “To be THE national model for patient centered care,” they are 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 hyper-converged ‘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, 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: Scale Computing’s HC3, The Hyperconverged Datacenter-In-A-Box

“We were really impressed with HC3’s seamless integration of servers, storage and virtualization capabilities,” Painter 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.

https://www.scalecomputing.com/case_studies/families-inc/

“HC3 is a huge advantage from the standpoint of managing your infrastructure. Instead of a separate interface for every layer in the environment, you are condensing it to a single tool.” Greg Starnes, Network Coordinator

Jonesboro, AR. IT Staff of two.

Solution: 4 Node, 128GB RAM, 4x Quad Core Intel CPUs, 16 SAS Drives, 8x GigE

Healthcare Success Story: Families, Inc.

FAST FACTS:

Founded in 2000, Families, Inc. Counseling Services is one of the leading group counseling practices in Arkansas, and home to a team of highly respected mental health professionals. The company relies on their IT infrastructure, which includes a hosted Electronic Medical Records system in addition to their in-house environment. As with others in the healthcare industry, Families, Inc. is subject to HIPAA compliance.

INTRODUCTION:

Families, Inc. was in the midst of an infrastructure refresh to support a much-needed upgrade to their in-house email application for HIPAA compliance reasons, among others. Understanding the benefits of virtualization, the IT department was considering a hosted solution, as well as a do-it-yourself virtualization deployment with VMware, EMC’s VNXe and a handful of host servers.

CHALLENGE:

With a small IT department consisting of one full-time and one part-time employee to support a company of 350 employees, Families, Inc. was drawn to a hosted solution for their virtualization infrastructure, but keeping the solution in-house gave Families the control needed to ensure the security and encryption necessary for HIPAA compliance. In addition, the cost of this approach proved to outweigh the benefit of having the IT infrastructure offsite when analyzed from a total cost of ownership perspective. “With the size of our company, we were right at the bubble where you would be paying way more for a hosted solution than to bring it in-house,” recalled Greg Starnes, Network Coordinator for Families, Inc.

As an alternative, Families also considered a do-it-yourself virtualization deployment that combined VMware, servers and EMC’s VNXe as shared storage. While the pricing was more affordable than the hosted solution, the complexity of managing such a solution made it an unrealistic alternative for Families to implement. “Growth in a VMware environment would be hard to manage. We continue to grow every time we turn around – 20 to 40 new staff each year. We had to have a solution that was able to scale without adding complexity,” said Starnes.

SOLUTION:

Families was introduced to Scale Computing’s HC3, a ‘datacenter-in-a-box’ that seamlessly integrates servers, storage and virtualization in one easy-to-use system. With no virtualization software to license, no external storage to buy and the hypervisor already integrated, HC3 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.

“HC3 is a huge advantage from the standpoint of managing your infrastructure. Instead of a separate interface for every layer in the environment, you are condensing it into a single tool,” said Starnes. HC3 was built with the availability of a virtualized server and SAN, the scalability of a clustered infrastructure and the simplicity of a single server.

“For small IT shops, the less components you have to worry about, the easier it is to handle,” Starnes continued. “If we need to add more memory, or processing power or more storage, we can just drop in another node.”

Small and midsized businesses implementing virtualization are able to realize greater cost savings when implementing HC3compared to other solutions. “The total cost of ownership when you include the ongoing management is considerably less compared to the other options we considered,“ said Starnes. Starting at under $25,500, HC3 is ideal for first-time virtualizers and those that have avoided virtualizing due to the costs and complexities of the implementation and management.

https://www.scalecomputing.com/case_studies/medical-imaging-northwest/

"I think I could have gotten the same thing done [with the HP blade server and Hyper-V solution], but it would have been infinitely more complex, time consuming and nowhere near as redundant as what I've got with HC3." Chuck Myers, System Administrator

Tacoma, WA. IT Staff of four.
Scale Solution: Four nodes, 128GB RAM, Four Quad Core Intel CPUs, 16 SATA Drive, 8x GigE

Healthcare Success Story: Medical Imaging Northwest

FAST FACTS:

Medical Imaging Northwest (MINW) is a group of 25 private practice radiologists, technologists, and staff committed to providing the finest medical imaging technology to its patients and the communities they serve around Washington. The practice consists of approximately 150 employees operating at multiple locations including five diagnostic imaging outpatient locations and three hospitals.

INTRODUCTION:

Medical Imaging Northwest’s IT environment consisted of four racks of servers with direct attached storage (DAS) running Microsoft Windows 2003. The practice had discussed virtualization with its reseller, Black Box Network Services, and had even tested a small Hyper-V deployment on a limited basis but had never committed to a full deployment. “We were operating on the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ framework,” said Chuck Myers, System Administrator at MINW. “Sixty to seventy-percent of our servers were beyond end-of-life and we were trying to squeeze every last day out of them that we possibly could,” he continued.

CHALLENGE:

MINW had a handful of aging servers that were showing signs of failure. The practice was faced with a decision: reactively purchase new servers to replace their existing servers as they failed, or proactively invest in a virtualization solution. Virtualization would enable them to take advantage of high availability, a smaller footprint, and efficiency in deploying new servers as virtual machines. However, the traditional virtualization solution being considered (a typical do-it-yourself solution combining HP blade servers and Microsoft’s Hyper-V) would introduce complexity that would require a considerable amount of effort and training to deploy and maintain.

SOLUTION:

MINW was introduced to Scale Computing’s HC3 by the same reseller that they were initially testing a traditional virtualization solution through. As the industry’s leading hyper-converged solution built specifically for midmarket companies, HC3 could solve the complexity and time management issues that MINW had seen with the Hyper-V test environment. “I think I could have gotten the same thing done [with the HP blade server and Hyper-V solution], but it would have been infinitely more complex, time consuming and nowhere near as redundant as what I’ve got with HC3,” said Myers.

HC3 was built with the availability of a virtualized server and SAN, the scalability of a clustered infrastructure and the simplicity of a single server. By deploying HC3, the practice was able to realize the benefits of a fully virtualized environment without the added complexity of a typical virtualization deployment – all at a fraction of the cost of the other solutions they had considered. With no virtualization software to license, no external storage to buy and the hypervisor already integrated in the system, HC3 radically simplifies the infrastructure needed to keep applications running.

Reflecting on the benefits of consolidating his servers onto the HC3 system Myers said, “We currently have four racks of equipment and by the time we are finished with the virtualization project, I expect to decrease that by half.” In addition to a smaller footprint, Myers was particularly taken with the simplicity of managing his VMs using HC3. “In just two clicks, I’m able to pull up a console of my server in front of me from the HC3 user interface. I can see my servers and the resources they are using at a quick glance.”

Electronic Health Records and HIPPA requirements made the decision of HC3 versus a cloud-based solution easy for the security conscious practice. “With HC3, I get virtualization as an appliance that provides cost savings, a smaller footprint in the server room, ease of use in the UI and I don’t have any of the security concerns that you have with a cloud-based product,” said Myers.

Myers is well aware of cloud-based email solutions and file server solutions, but firmly believes that once physical control of the data is relinquished, no guarantee can be made on data security. “As other practices research the idea of virtualizing servers for the cost savings, they’ll begin to realize that it is beneficial from start to finish to go with a product like HC3 onsite.”

https://www.scalecomputing.com/case_studies/liverpool-school-of-tropical-medicine/

“The Scale solution is perfect for our environment. As well as simplified management, the face value of the Scale solution has saved us over £80,000." Matthew Underhill, IT Team Leader at Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine

Liverpool, UK

Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine

Key Challenges

Existing storage environment was ageing and expensive to replace

• No ability to scale out
• No replication capabilities
• Disaster recovery tests were time consuming
• Existing infrastructure was complex and difficult to manage

Scale Computing Solution

Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine selected Scale Computing’s HC3 cluster and a secondary disaster recovery cluster

Business Benefits

• No licensing fees
• Cost savings of over £80,000
• Over a 50 per cent reduction in time management
• Ability to replicate data
• Quick and efficient disaster recovery testing
• Added ability to scale out – no need to over provision storage
• Data replication and complete business continuity

“The Scale solution is perfect for our environment. As well as simplified management, the face value of the Scale solution has saved us over £80,000. This is an amazing cost reduction and we can put this money to use elsewhere.” Matthew Underhill, IT Team Leader at Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine

Established in 1898, the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) was the first institution in the world dedicated to research and teaching in the field of tropical medicine. The school is a registered charity and has a worldwide reputation for delivering state of the art research combating tropical diseases. The school attracts over 600 students each year from 68 countries. As a leading international teaching institution, LSTM has been at the forefront of critical research into a number of tropical, infectious diseases including Malaria, HIV and tuberculosis.

IT Challenges

With critical data and research projects in the pipeline, the school needed a robust IT solution, which was cost effective and simple to manage. Ensuing business continuity was also fundamental to the institution’s needs. With some research projects taking years, ensuring this vital information is backed up and protected is critical to the school’s reputation, and therefore imperative to the solution’s success.

LSTM initially built its IT environment using a Server BladeCenter chassis and SAN implementation utilising Microsoft’s Hyper-V failover cluster technology. Matthew Underhill, IT Team Leader at Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine commented: “The environment was incredibly complex to manage and we were looking to improve our hardware. Our blade systems were over three years old and we needed to set up replication in order to guarantee disaster recovery capabilities. We couldn’t just buy another BladeCenter as it wouldn’t meet our requirements.”

The school would have needed to upgrade its primary storage and purchase an additional secondary solution for replication, which is an additional expense the institution could not afford. As a charity, LSTM is constantly looking to invest in cost effective solutions.

Searching for a new solution

Alongside cost and an aging environment, complexity was a huge challenge for the school. After deciding to upgrade its existing storage environment, LSTM looked for a platform that could reduce costs, simplify management and provide replication capabilities. “We wanted a platform that would allow us to replicate to our second data centre,” explained Underhill.

After evaluating the market for a new platform, LSTM considered both Nutanix and Scale Computing. “The Scale solution was perfect for our environment. We first encountered Scale Computing at SpiceWorld a networking event in London and after hearing the Scale team speak, I was immediately engaged,” commented Underhill. “We also visited Oxford University, a current Scale customer and after seeing first-hand how the Scale solution worked we were certain this was perfect for us.”

Underhill added: “When it came to the production install the Scale system was set up and running within four to five hours. Previously this would have taken us three to four days.”

Simplified management

Since deployment, the HC3 cluster has dramatically reduced management time by over 50 per cent and its simplicity has allowed LSTM to focus on other areas of business, saving the company both time and money. “With Scale, we don’t have to worry about the operating system, this is all taken care of for us,” said Underhill. “Previously if there was an issue with any of our servers we had to spend hours troubleshooting but Scale has completely streamlined this process and we don’t have to worry about the everyday management of our systems. The Scale HC3 cluster has completely simplified our infrastructure.”

Reduced costs

Alongside simplified management, LSTM has benefited from reduced IT costs. “The face value of the Scale solution has saved us over £80,000. This is an amazing cost reduction and we can put this money to use elsewhere,” added Underhill. “In addition to cost savings, we no longer need the knowledge or expertise to deal with growing complex systems, which was becoming a challenge.”

Replication

After opting for a disaster recovery cluster alongside the HC3 platform, LSTM now has the added benefit of replication. Through regular snapshots, back-up testing is simple and conducted regularly, allowing the institution to guarantee business continuity. Underhill concluded: “With Scale, we can now test our backups more regularly and can recover VMs within five minutes, ensuring we will be back up and running again in the event of a disaster.”