VxRail extends flexibility in Healthcare with new EHR best practices
Mon, 01 Jun 2020 13:39:38 -0000
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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
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
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Healthcare Homerun for VxRail – MEDITECH Certified
Thu, 16 Jul 2020 19:14:23 -0000
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At Dell Technologies we are excited and proud to announce the VxRail HCI (Hyperconverged Infrastructure) certification for MEDITECH. Dell Technologies is #1 in the Hyperconverged Systems segment, a position held for 12 consecutive quarters1. VxRail is the only fully integrated, pre-configured, and tested hyperconverged infrastructure that simplifies and extends VMware environments. This solution helps simplify MEDITECH environments using VMware VMs improving performance and scalability by bringing together and optimizing multiple workloads.
With this Dell Technologies certified solution that leverages VxRail, MEDITECH environments are easier to use, have lower risk of failure while continuing to provide a fiscally responsible approach.
Dell EMC and MEDITECH worked closely with an approved integrator* during the certification of the VxRail running the MEDITECH test harness. Testing consisted of a VxRail cluster to support all VMs required for the MEDITECH application, and provide infrastructure redundancy etc. MBF (MEDITECH Backup Facilitator) backups are accomplished with Dell EMC’s Networker-NMMEDI in conjunction with RecoverPoint for VM’s, that has been tested and is backed by best in class implementation and a continuous focus on positive customer experience.
1 IDC WW Quarterly Converged Systems Tracker, Vendor Revenue (US$M) Q1 2020, June 18, 2020
Conclusion:
Dell Technologies makes IT transformation real for MEDITECH environments with a data first approach and as a leading provider of Healthcare IT infrastructure we are uniquely positioned to offer a full breath of solutions for MEDITECH environments. In fact, more than 60% of MEDITECH’s customers deploy a Dell Technologies solution2. For these reasons at Dell Technologies we’re excited and proud to add this certification, which supports MEDITECH Expanse, 6.X, Client/Server and MAGIC environments, to our Dell Technologies Healthcare portfolio.
*Special thanks to Teknicor for providing their best practices, assistance and lab space for this certification process.
2 HIMSS Analytics, May 2019.
Resources:
Read Solutions for MEDITECH Environments
Author: Vic Dery, Senior Principal Engineer, VxRail Technical Marketing
Big Solutions on Dell EMC VxRail with SQL 2019 Big Data Cluster
Thu, 09 Jul 2020 19:20:04 -0000
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The amount of data and different formats organizations must manage, ingest, and analyze has been the driving force behind Microsoft SQL 2019 Big Data Clusters (BDC). SQL Server 2019 BDC demonstrates the deployment of scalable clusters of SQL Server, Spark, and containerized HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) running on Kubernetes.
We recently deployed and tested SQL Server 2019 BDC on Dell EMC VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure to demonstrate how VxRail delivers the performance, scalability, and flexibility needed to bring these multiple workloads together.
The Dell EMC VxRail platform was selected for its ability to incorporate compute, storage, virtualization, and management in one platform offering. The key feature of the VxRail HCI is the integration of vSphere, vSAN, and VxRail HCI System Software for an efficient and reliable deployment and operations experience. The use of VxRail with SQL Server 2019 BDC makes it easy to unite relational data with big data.
The testing demonstrates the advantages of using VxRail with SQL Server 2019 BDC for analytic application development. This also demonstrates how Docker, Kubernetes, and the vSphere Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver accelerate the application development life cycle when they are used with VxRail. The lab environment for development and testing used four VxRail E560F nodes supported by the vSphere CSI driver. With this solution, developers can provision SQL Server BDC in containerized environments without the complexities of traditional methods for installing databases and provisioning storage.
Our white paper, Microsoft SQL Server 2019 Big Data Cluster on Dell EMC VxRail shows the power of implementing SQL Server 2019 BDC technologies on VxRail. Integrating SQL Server 2019 RDBMS, SQL Server BDC, MongoDB, and Oracle RDBMS helps to create a unified data analytics application. Using VxRail enhances the ability of SQL Server 2019 to scale out storage and compute clusters while embracing the virtualization techniques from VMware. This SQL Server 2019 BDC solution also benefits from the simplicity of a complete yet flexible validated Dell EMC VxRail with Kubernetes management and storage integration.
The solution demonstrates the combined value of the following technologies:
- VxRail E560F – All-flash performance
- Large tables stored on a scaled-out HDFS storage cluster that is hosted by BDC
- Smaller related data tables that are hosted on SQL Server, MongoDB, and Oracle databases
- Distributed queries that are enabled by the PolyBase capability in SQL Server 2019 to process Transact-SQL queries that access external data in SQL Server, Oracle, Teradata, and MongoDB.
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Big Data Cluster Services
This diagram shows how the pools are built. It provides details of the benefits for Kubernetes features for container orchestration at scale, including:
- Autoscaling, replication, and recovery of containers
- Intracontainer communication, such as IP sharing
- A single entity—a pod—for creating and managing multiple containers
- A container resource usage and performance analysis agent, cAdvisor
- Network pluggable architecture
- Load balancing
- Health check service
This white paper, Microsoft SQL Server 2019 Big Data Cluster on Dell EMC VxRail, addresses big data storage, the tools for handling big data, and the details around testing with TPC-H. When we tested data virtualization with PolyBase, the queries were successful, running without error and returning the results that joined all four data sources.
Because data virtualization does not involve physically copying and moving the data (so that the data is available to business users in real-time), BDC simplifies and centralizes access to and analysis of the organization’s data sphere. It enables IT to manage the solution by consolidating big data and data virtualization on one platform with a proven set of tools.
Success starts with the right foundation:
SQL Server 2019 BDC is a compelling new way to utilize SQL Server to bring high-value relational data and high-volume big data together on a unified, scalable data platform. All of this can be deployed with VxRail, enabling enterprises to experience the power of PolyBase to virtualize their data stores, create data lakes, and create scalable data marts in a unified, secure environment without needing to implement slow and costly Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) pipelines. This makes data-driven applications and analysis more responsive and productive. SQL Server 2019 BDC and Dell EMC VxRail provide a complete unified data platform to deliver intelligent applications that can help make any organization more successful.
Read the full paper to learn more about how Dell EMC VxRail with SQL 2019 Big Data Clusters can:
- Bring high-value relational data and high-volume big data together on a single, scalable platform.
- Incorporates intelligent features and gets insights from more of your data—including data stored beyond SQL Server in Hadoop, Oracle, Teradata, and MongoDB.
- Supports and enhances your database management and data-driven apps with advanced analytics using Hadoop and Spark.
Additional VxRail & SQL resources:
Microsoft SQL Server 2019 Big Data Cluster on Dell EMC VxRail
Microsoft SQL Server on VMware Cloud Foundation on Dell EMC VxRail
Key Benefits of Running Microsoft SQL Server on Dell EMC hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) - Whitepaper
Key benefits of running Microsoft SQL Server on Dell EMC Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) - Infographic
Architecting Microsoft SQL Server on VMware vSphere
Author: Vic Dery, Senior Principal Engineer, VxRail Technical Marketing