Case Study
Sentara Healthcare sees 3x faster performance migrating EHR workloads to public cloud
OUR CLIENT
Our client, Sentara Healthcare, is a not-for-profit healthcare organization serving Virginia and northeastern North Carolina. With more than two million patients and 5,000 physicians, they operate 12 acute care hospitals with 3,739 beds, 10 nursing centers and three assisted living facilities. Sentara also offers its own managed-care plan, covering one million subscribers in the region. They have 16,000 max concurrent users and annual revenue of $4.5 billion.
THE CHALLENGE
Available tools hindered the full migration of Epic EHR workloads to Azure
Sentara wanted to move their Epic EHR workloads to the public cloud on Microsoft Azure. However, the best tool available in their existing toolbox—Azure NetApp Files (ANF)—didn’t offer all the capabilities needed to migrate such large workloads, such as disaster recovery, reporting and IRIS. Additional ANF challenges—including expensive and inefficient snapshots—also needed to be evaluated and improved.
Ongoing expenditures also needed to be limited; Sentara’s existing costs for ANF were expected to grow by 10 percent year-over-year, bloating their operational expenses. To make the move to public cloud successful, Sentara needed a solution that would offer ultra-fast performance without blowing through their budget.
THE TRANSFORMATION
EHR workloads get 3x faster performance with new platform
UST evaluated Sentara’s challenges and knew they could help make the cloud transition successful while lowering their client’s operational costs. Their plan included Silk, a platform designed to quickly move mission-critical data to the cloud while keeping it operating at performance standards on par with even the fastest on-premises environments.
The Silk platform sits between the customer’s workloads and the underlying cloud infrastructure, accelerating the cloud adoption by lifting and shifting the entire complex workload onto the cloud with no need to refactor. Benefits include:
- Up to 10x faster performance
- Enterprise data services
- Always-on availability
THE IMPACT
Significant performance gains and cost-cutting delivery
Working with UST, Sentara was able to achieve 2-3x performance gains over ANF throughput, input/output operations per second (IOPs) and latency upon native encryption. Achieving 2:1 data compression on native encryption means Sentara was able to reduce the number of Azure resources it needed, helping to cut their costs by up to 20%. Future scaling will not UST snapshots are zero cost and can be done instantly and consistently throughout the day. Disaster recovery and reporting, which would have cost $28,000 in ANF, dropped to zero costs with the full UST set-up. The solution contributed to these impressive results:
3x faster performance
20% lower costs
Significantly faster disaster recovery
EXPERTISE & RESOURCES
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