The document discusses how EMC VPLEX can help healthcare organizations overcome IT challenges by providing 100% uptime, seamlessly moving data and applications across storage arrays, accelerating consolidation efforts, and reducing costs. VPLEX virtualizes storage, enables transparent data movement, and provides access to data across sites for high availability, application mobility, data mobility, ongoing migrations and tech refreshes, and simplified provisioning. It was implemented at Indiana University Health to support online data migrations without downtime.
Today we’re going to talk about EMC’s new local and distributed storage federation platform, EMC VPLEX.
In IT today, there are strong needs for moving applications across arrays without downtime, ensuring applications retain continuous accessto their users and data, and that SLAs be kept for business continuity and strength of operations. They need this in order to accelerate tech refreshes, optimize performance and reduce CapEx and OpEx. Now, customers need technologies to help them achieve this between sites over distance, across heterogeneous storage, and with no interruption to hosts, applications or users.
To address these IT needs, EMC has introduced VPLEX. VPLEX is a new storage platform that inserts in the SAN, in between hosts and storage, and can extend data over distance, within, between and across data centers – an innovation that refer to as “AccessAnywhere”. There are multiple products in the VPLEX family, but they all have several key things in common, which we’ll discuss more in depth, including cache coherency across engines in a cluster and between clusters, N+1 scaling for performance, N-1 resiliency, and an architecture that can support globalization of applications, over time.GeoSynchrony is the Operating System that manages VPLEX.Easy to use GUI: includes Mobility Central and Storage View Maps
These are the top features available with VPLEX.
Increase protection and reduce unplanned application outages by creating a HA infrastructure with VPLEX.
The main use case for VPLEX is seamless Application mobility which allows users to balance and relocate workloads between arrays within and between data centers.
VPLEX is the only product that allows users to create an Active/Active configuration between two data centers. This increases resource utilization and reduces RTO to zero.
By allowing seamless data mobility VPLEX allows for migrations and tech refreshes to take place over 90% faster.
Provision all storage in one tool by using Unisphere for VPLEX
It is always a good idea to begin any undertaking with an end goal in mind. And developing a cloud strategy for Healthcare IT (HIT) is no exception. Cloud computing represents a paradigm shift which enables IT to focus less on the physical assets it is managing and more on the services it is providing—services to patients, physicians, ambulatory care providers, public health organizations, and payers. Providing services across the continuum of care will require the ability to scale application workloads, share information, and ensure that patient information is protected, secured, and always available when needed. It also will mean changing the business cost model, streamlining administrative and clinical workflows, automating processes, and consolidating IT assets. In fact, thanks to the promise of cloud computing, today’s Healthcare IT departments can consider new business models as investments are made toward a fully optimized electronic health record. These models will leverage the IT infrastructure to bring more benefit and revenues to the organization.
About the Customer:Indiana University Health is Indiana’s most comprehensive healthcare system. A unique partnership with Indiana University School of Medicine gives patients access to innovative treatments and therapies. IU Health is comprised of hospitals, physicians and allied services dedicated to providing preeminent care throughout Indiana and beyond.With over 21,000 employees and 2,889 beds IU Health’s IT department has a sizable environment to support.Opportunity:Existing customer, multiple Clariions/VNX’s within their environment.Customer was struggling with supporting frequent migrations and wanted to find a better way to execute them.Migrations and gotcha’s with migrations. Use Case/VPLEX Difference:Customer was impressed with VPLEX’s ability to virtualize the storage and eventually move workloads between datacenters and felt that its technology far surpassed that of competitive offers.Customer will be using VPLEX Metro in a 2 Phase approach:Phase 1: to get all production storage behind VPLEXPhase 2: to move workloads between datacenters located roughly 50 miles apart to prevent outages during maintenance windows & disaster avoidance