The result of going digital is that businesses cannot tolerate the same levels of planned and unplanned downtime that they could before. Today’s healthcare providers need to modernize their data centers to provide scalability, flexibility, efficiency, and security. The good news? Advancements in health IT infrastructure – particularly data center virtualization -- allow organizations to drastically improve the quality of patient care while controlling costs and gaining improved visibility into enterprise data.
Convergence in the data center, software defined technologies, and cloud computing have brought new options for data protection, disaster recovery, and business continuity that have never been as widely available or as affordable as they are today. It’s an exciting time, but these changes can lead to a landscape that can be confusing and challenging for businesses. Because backup is seen as a cost and an insurance policy, rather than as a business enabler, many organizations have underinvested in it for many years, which impairs IT managers’ ability to meet availability requirements for data and applications.
Today’s environment, in which 80 percent of businesses experience network faults caused by human error on a regular basis, is not a formula for success. One reason? Healthcare requirements and regulations and mergers, along with explosions in the quantity of data and the needs and wants of caregivers and patients, have increasingly put a strain on current data centers. Plus, it becomes even more challenging when one factors in external threats like phishing, ransomware, distributed denial of service attacks (DDOS), and other breaches. As organizations continue to seek out better ways to provide advanced, meaningful care for patients securely, the need to discover and implement new technology becomes more urgent, but the cost of failure is expensive.
The result of going digital is that businesses cannot tolerate the same levels of planned and unplanned downtime that they could before. Today’s healthcare providers need to modernize their data centers to provide scalability, flexibility, efficiency, and security. The good news? Advancements in health IT infrastructure – particularly data center virtualization -- allow organizations to drastically improve the quality of patient care while controlling costs and gaining improved visibility into enterprise data.
The Rise of Virtualization.
Traditional converged systems, ones that are packaged solutions, take existing technology and consolidate it into a repeatable, standardized deployment framework. The new model of converged systems, by contrast, takes that disparate technology and converges it in a much more tightly integrated way, using something called the software-defined data center (SDDC). Rather than dedicating a set of resources to a particular computing technology, application, or line of business, converged infrastructure creates a pool of virtualized capacity that is shared.
A study by MarketsandMarkets predicts the SDDC market will surpass $77 billion by 2020. With SDDC, control of the data center is fully automated, with hardware configurations maintained through intelligent software systems, enabling far more flexibility and eliminating much of the complexity in configuring and making changes. This contrasts sharply with traditional data centers, where the infrastructure is typically defined by hardware and devices. By abstracting storage, server, and networking functionality throughout the data center, organizations benefit from increased virtualization while maintaining the ability to support and manage legacy enterprise applications.
A business logic layer is also required to translate application requirements, service level agreements (SLAs), policies, and cost considerations into provisioning and management instructions. It’s the business logic layer that allows companies to leverage this abstraction to coordinate and apply resources to ensure that applications have the capacity, availability, and response time SLAs that business requires. All of this means an organization can more rapidly provision infrastructure and applications.
The New Data Model: Flexible, Fast, and Cost-Effective.
Before virtualization, it was common for server utilization to average under 10 percent, but with virtualization it’s not unusual to see server utilization in the 90 percent range. Documenting and prioritizing data center resources that should be virtualized is a major challenge an organization can most effectively address by implementing best practices for SDDC migration. Enter the digital transformation—also known as DT, digitalization, DX, digital everything (DE) and Industry 4.0 – which will attain “macroeconomic scale over the next three to four years, changing the way enterprises operate and reshaping the global economy,” according to IDC Research. “This is the dawn of the DX Economy,” the analyst firm advises. “The network of the DX future must be faster, more resilient, and more secure.”
Converged infrastructure offers a flexible, fast, cost-effective model that frees an organization to focus on corporate-building initiatives. Not only does it eliminate IT obstacles, it also replaces them with the highest levels of efficiency, speed, and service to lead the digital transformation into the next wave of healthcare delivery. Essentially, a converged infrastructure is any type of infrastructure that takes two or more discrete pieces of technology and consolidates them into one information system solution. It addresses the problem of siloed architectures and IT sprawl by pooling and sharing IT resources that are managed using business logic.
Convergence of the functions of multiple appliances onto a single platform also creates tremendous opportunities to reduce costs, streamline management, and increase business agility. The virtues to be gained by moving to converged data center infrastructure greatly outweigh the traditional approach of deploying specialized hardware platforms throughout the data center, because virtualizing the data center with SDDC allows an organization to:
- Reduce costs: Hardware is typically the highest line item cost in the data center, and SDDC allows control of capital expenditure spending by deploying converged hardware platforms. Organizations also save money by simplifying management, consuming less energy, and streamlining hardware maintenance.
- Control data center cooling: Each server and storage platform in a data center generates heat, and maintaining data center cooling systems is expensive and time-consuming. Virtualization allows for the use of fewer dedicated hardware platforms, so a data center will generate much less heat.
- Redeploy resources faster: When a physical server or storage device in a data center fails, IT has to determine if there’s a backup device available, and if there’s a current backup of the data on that device. With virtualization, the redeploy can occur within minutes, and VM (virtual machine) snapshots can be enabled with just a few clicks.
- Eliminate vendor lock: One of the greatest advantages of virtualization is that it creates an abstraction layer between software and hardware. Best of all, VMs are easily portable across platforms.
In the modern data center, everything will be software-defined, highly scalable, and highly flexible, including security devices, hardware firewalls, routers, switches, VPN concentrators, servers, and storage arrays.
Attaining New Levels of Performance
Converged data center services make it easy to adopt and implement the industry’s highest performing infrastructure technologies to keep things running efficiently and effectively. Resources can be allocated and used based on analytics, workflows, and workloads directed to best serve the business need at any particular point in time. When optimized, organizations can attain new levels of agility and flexibility across all domains of the data center, including network, servers, virtualization, and storage.
With a modern data center, ensuring that end users can access the services and applications they need to continue business operations, and that data — the lifeblood of the organization — is protected and accessible, is the real measure of business resiliency. When clinicians leave their mobile workspaces, they can log out in a way that is HIPAA-compliant without exiting currently deployed apps. . As HIPAA compliance and medical regulations become more complex, IT’s job is to make sure that the technology environment is secure, but the department can’t do that if nurses are using sticky notes with their passwords right on their computers; that’s not a secure environment. What is secure, though, is a converged data center that virtualizes the elements of infrastructure, from storage and networking to process and memory. The infrastructure improves on traditional endpoint security because it eliminates user password responsibility. The entire infrastructure is managed from a single place, which gives IT administrators more visibility and control over the environment. This results in fewer user errors and faster technology speeds.
Converged infrastructure provides preintegrated, validated, and workload-optimized technology that frees IT teams to focus on delivering IT services instead of maintaining infrastructure. The result? Greater than four times faster application delivery, 96 percent less downtime, and 41 percent less time keeping the lights on. With virtualization, a single converged hardware platform can provide server, storage, and networking functions, while the IT department gains greater flexibility to deploy virtual machines to address specific objectives.
Healthcare organizations generally are accustomed to looking at dedicated hardware platforms that serve clearly defined functions, but virtualization changes the rules by radically transforming computing to make it more scalable SDDC offers healthcare organizations a secure way to manage and deploy virtual desktops that save clinicians valuable time on administrative tasks and allow them to focus instead on interacting with patients and providing the best quality of healthcare possible.
