VxRail extends flexibility in Healthcare with new EHR best practices
Wed, 24 Apr 2024 16:48:02 -0000
|Read Time: 0 minutes
The Healthcare industry is pressured to deliver not only as health providers, but making the infrastructure that operates the healthcare system, secure, scalable, and simple to use. This allows healthcare providers to focus on patients. VxRail has had a great deal of success in the healthcare vertical because its core values align so closely with those demanded by the industry. With early successes in VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure), healthcare IT departments expanded to more business and even life critical IT use cases with VxRail, because it proved that it can be highly scalable, simple to use, and has security built into everything it does.
“Best Practices for VMware vSAN with Epic on Dell EMC VxRail” created in collaboration with our peers at VMware highlights the considerations around a small to medium size environment, specifically for Epic. It uses a 6 node VxRail configuration to provide predictable and consistent performance, as well as Life Cycle Management (LCM) for the VxRail. The VxRail node used in this best practice is an E560N – an all NVMe solution. Balancing workload and budget requirements, the dual-socket E560N provides a cost-effective, space-efficient 1U platform. Available with up to 32TB of NVMe capacity, the E560N is the first all-NVMe 1U VxRail platform. The all-NVMe capability provides a higher performance at low queue depths making it much easier to reliably deliver very high real-world performance for a SQL Server database management system (DBMS). Being able to run multiple healthcare applications including EHR, while successfully maintaining the secure, scalable, and simplified use of VxRail is possible. Enabling healthcare IT departments to scale and expanded infrastructure to meet the ever-growing demands of the health providers and the healthcare industry.
VxRail has had a great deal of success in the healthcare vertical because its core values align so closely to those demanded by the industry
- Secure - Security is a core part of VxRail design, this starts at the supply chain and the components used to build it, continues into the features and software designed into it, and evolves with every lifecycle management that updates the VxRail HCI (hyperconverged infrastructure) system software. The most recent feature added supports 2-factor authentication (2FA), to provide an additional layer of security. VxRail has FIPS 140-2 validated encryption based on vSAN architecture. There is a detailed whitepaper for the VxRail security that covers in detail security features and certifications here.
- Scalable - What makes VxRail an effective solution for healthcare is its ability to scale, not just for EHR applications, but for any application sharing the solution. With VxRail, you can size based on the known or expected workloads for the initial deployment and provide a solution that meets that workload requirement. This allows for the healthcare infrastructure to buy for the requirements of today, not the estimated requirements of three to five years down the road, as VxRail will scale easily into the future. Scaling the VxRail is easy... need more compute, just add an additional node; need more storage space, just add additional capacity drives.
- Simplicity - Why is simplicity important when it comes to not just healthcare solutions, but all workloads? It is about IT teams being able to focus on their business and less on the continuous effort to maintain environments. VxRail simplifies operations with software-driven automation and lifecycle management. VxRail is continuously tested and updated as a solution from the BIOS, firmware, and HCI to the VMware software
VxRail is flexible enough to support hospital systems, alongside other applications for business and even education. A great example of this this flexibility can be seen in this Mercy Ships case study. The new best practices for Epic EHR combined with the proven successes that VxRail has with VDI in the Healthcare vertical are a testament to VxRail’s versatility.
Additional Resources:
Author: Vic Dery, Senior Principal Engineer, VxRail Technical Marketing
@VxVicTX
Best Practices for VMware vSAN with Epic on Dell EMC VxRail - Here
Dell EMC VxRail Comprehensive Security Design - Here
See more solutions from Dell for healthcare and life sciences - Here
Customer profile Mercy Ships - Here