PH Tech Simplifies Its Data Center with the Nutanix Complete Block Solution
Customer Company Size
Mid-size Company
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- Nutanix Complete Block
- Nutanix Distributed File System (NDFS)
- VMware ESXi
Tech Stack
- Intel Xeon 5640 processors
- Fusion-io ioDrive PCI-e SSD card
- VMware ESXi
- Nutanix Distributed File System (NDFS)
- Nutanix Heat-Optimized Tiering
Implementation Scale
- Departmental Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Digital Expertise
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
Applicable Industries
- Healthcare & Hospitals
- Software
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Quality Assurance
Use Cases
- Edge Computing & Edge Intelligence
- Infrastructure Inspection
- Remote Asset Management
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Performance Health Technology, Ltd. (PH Tech), headquartered in Salem, Oregon, is a leading provider of comprehensive Third-Party Administrative Services for medical, dental, vision, and pharmacy plans. PH Tech’s Third-Party Administrative Services are a clear example of what sets it apart. It looks at administrative problems from its client’s vantage point and develops customized software that solves their specific needs. PH Tech leverages its deep health care experience and technological expertise to create a complete matrix of valuable and unique services. The company has been experiencing rapid growth, which has placed stress on its existing systems, particularly its data center. This growth has necessitated the need for a more efficient, scalable, and cost-effective solution to manage its data center operations.
The Challenge
With PH Tech’s rapid growth over the past few years, the systems that have supported the company and that have helped make it a success have been placed under increasing amounts of stress. For the IT department, co-managed by System Administrators Kevin Waddell and Greg Straw, this stress was most apparent in the performance of the data center. As more and more clients were added to the system, keeping the data center performing in top condition had become an increasingly time- and labor-intensive task. As Kevin describes it, “We were facing more and more IOPS challenges every day, trying to maintain the throughput from our SAN. Most of the work we did each day was related to maintaining high performance levels across the system.” A key issue the team identified was the need to incorporate smart storage capabilities like heat mapping into the system so that they could maximize performance and storage while keeping costs to a minimum. With an increasing customer base and limited resources to handle the growing workload, though, any smart storage solution would have to be automated, scalable, and cost-effective.
The Solution
At different times within the past year both Kevin and Greg got to learn about the Nutanix Complete Block through various sources and thought it would be an ideal solution to their growing data center storage and processing issues. It was no surprise, then, that when they finally sat down to work out a long-term plan for their data center they quickly agreed that Nutanix was the only way to go. Featuring a compact size and integrated storage and compute functionality, a Nutanix Complete Block was installed in the company’s DEV environment in short order, effectively replacing that part of the multi-layered, highly interconnected data center infrastructure with a single box. Structurally, the 2U Nutanix Complete Block is comprised of four nodes, each containing dual Intel Xeon 5640 processors; 48GB RAM, expandable to 192GB; a 320GB Fusion-io ioDrive PCI-e SSD card; 300GB of SATA SDD; 5x 1TB 7200rpm SATA HDDs; and 10GbE and 1GbE connectivity. In terms of software, each node came pre-installed with VMware ESXi, an industry-standard hypervisor; Nutanix Distributed File System (NDFS), which virtualizes local storage from all nodes into a unified pool; and Nutanix Heat-Optimized Tiering, which automatically tiers data between the Fusion-io ioDrive and the SATA drives.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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