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Converged Infrastructure and Healthcare: Know the Benefits
Healthcare environments are in the thick of the data and networking boom, and they’ve had to find new ways to optimize their data centers. This is where converged infrastructure comes in.
Bill Kleyman
April 12, 2016
4 Min Read
We’ve seen some big advancements in the healthcare data center world. There are new ways to deliver patient care, more ways to enable the healthcare practitioner and better ways to support the ever-evolving end user. Through it all, we’ve seen more applications, workloads and virtualization technologies being deployed into modern healthcare environments.
The application of interconnecting “things” is making a significant impact on healthcare, as well. Consider this: A recent Cisco report notes that an important factor contributing to the growing adoption of what it calls the “Internet of Everything” is the emergence of wearable devices, a category with high growth potential. Wearable devices, as the name suggests, are worn on a person and have the ability to connect and communicate to the network either directly, through embedded cellular connectivity, or through another device (primarily a smart phone) using Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or another technology.
The report goes on to describe how these devices come in various shapes and forms, ranging from smart watches, smart glasses, heads-up displays (HUDs), health and fitness trackers, health monitors, wearable scanners and navigation devices.
All of this creates more data and more workloads that need to be managed. As the report notes:
Annual global cloud IP traffic will reach 8.6 ZB by the end of 2019, up from 2.1 ZB per year in 2014.
Global cloud IP traffic will more than quadruple over the next 5 years.
Global cloud IP traffic will account for more than 83 percent of total data center traffic by 2019.
Healthcare environments are in the thick of this data and networking boom, and they’ve had to find new ways to optimize their data centers. They need new ways to support these new users, devices and services. They also have to overcome resource challenges and latency problems, not to mention be smarter about methods of delivering virtual workloads.
This is where converged infrastructure comes in. This isn’t just a new way to deliver core data center resources; this is a way to redefine the entire infrastructure. For example, with converged infrastructure, healthcare organizations can:
Create smaller healthcare data centers. Smaller data center footprints make companies more cost-efficient and agile. Converged infrastructure can be deployed as a validated architecture designed for specific use cases and user counts. Planning becomes easier, so organizations can design the data center they need today and the one they will need in the near future.
Create virtual workload isolation. As healthcare becomes increasingly virtualized and digitized, the underlying data center will be required to support new workloads. Traditional technologies can leave security gaps in how data is stored and where virtualization is managed. Converged infrastructure, in contrast, integrates core virtualization resources and allows for granular virtual machine control. Organizations can segment critical workloads and even isolate compliance-bound virtual machines and desktops.
Enforce compliance and regulation using CI. Organizations’ ability to segment traffic, virtual workloads and the entire network using converged infrastructure is powerful. The integration of core resources creates fewer management points and simplifies the control of data. Healthcare organizations can create powerful resource silos around pieces of data that can’t leave a specific server. Or, they can enforce access policies around very specific network segments, all living on the CI architecture.
Simplify management. Healthcare administrators are looking for better ways to manage their critical data center resources. Traditionally, they would rely on third-party systems or other kinds of controls to make this happen. Now, with CI, all core resources are under one engine, and management is simplified dramatically. This means administrators have better ways to control how resources are allocated to virtual machines, how specific user groups can be optimized, and even where compliance and regulation-bound workloads are being housed. Further, there is better integration with the underlying hypervisor via management plugins for even greater control.
Converged infrastructure aims to simplify IT operations by unifying core resources, but it can do a lot more for the business, as well. These rapidly deployable pieces of the data center allow healthcare organizations to scale quickly as they branch out into new locations. Pre-validated and based on referenced architecture, this type of infrastructure helps mitigate deployment risks and speeds overall deployment. This means faster delivery of core healthcare services, better management of critical systems and new economics around the entire data center.
Underwritten by HPE
Part of HPE’s Power of One strategy, HPE Converged Architecture 700 delivers infrastructure as one integrated stack. HPE Converged Architecture 700 delivers proven, repeatable building blocks of infrastructure maintained by one management platform (HPE OneView), built and delivered exclusively by qualified HPE Channel Partners. This methodology saves considerable time and resources, compared to the do-it-yourself (DIY) approach.
Based on a complete HPE stack consisting of HPE BladeSystem with Intel® Xeon® E5 v3-based HPE ProLiant BL460c Gen9 blades, HPE 3PAR StoreServ all-flash storage, HPE Networking, and HPE OneView infrastructure management software, the HPE Converged Architecture 700 can be easily modified to fit within your existing IT environment.
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