SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nutanix, the web-scale converged infrastructure company, today announced that St. Luke’s Health System, a leading US healthcare provider, has deployed Nutanix’s highly-scalable, reliable and easy-to-deploy architecture to provide a more flexible and efficient IT environment.
St. Luke’s selected Nutanix to support it during two major transitions: the migration of applications to the Windows 7 platform and to support the transition of an ambulatory healthcare provider onto St. Luke’s existing application platform on Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp. Because of the scalability and flexibility of the Nutanix platform, St. Luke’s was able to easily complete both projects without running into the compatibility and integration issues legacy systems often introduce.
Nutanix web-scale hyper-converged solutions with Citrix make the transition to virtual desktops easier, simplifying deployment and ongoing management. This ease of use allowed St. Luke’s to migrate more than 3,000 users to Windows 7-based virtual desktops in only three weeks with none of the compatibility issues of legacy systems. The Nutanix and Citrix solution is designed to predictably scale to meet any level of demand and can make migrations simple and effective. Additional virtual desktops are non-disruptively supported by simply adding new nodes to an existing deployment.
After a recent service expansion, St. Luke’s had only two months to transition a rehabilitation inpatient and ambulatory healthcare services onto its existing application platform, demanding rapid integration of the new facilities into the St. Luke’s IT ecosystem. This would not be possible using legacy architecture; however, Nutanix’s web-scale technology was able to meet the challenge by accelerating and simplifying its infrastructure deployment, thereby freeing resources for onboarding the new facility and clinical staff.
“One of the key reasons that we chose Nutanix was for its reliability and performance. This Citrix-based deployment came online to immediately provide a reliable environment across 30 clinics, a hospital and 600 devices,” said Brett Taylor, Director of IT Infrastructure and Operations, St Luke’s Healthcare System. “The Nutanix installation was straightforward and freed my team’s resources for other projects, a trend that will hopefully continue as the Nutanix solution helps to change the role of our IT team to one that assists our physicians and administrators find new innovative solutions for better care.”
“Cost and efficiency are huge concerns for the healthcare IT market, with the American Hospital Association showing that hospitals have absorbed $122 billion in cuts since 2010,” says George Fiffick, Healthcare Practice Manager at Nutanix. “The Nutanix hyper-converged architecture with web-scale technologies reinvents IT infrastructure and in doing so allows our healthcare customers to reduce costs, simplify operations and improve the end-user experience.”
Among St. Luke’s applications that are deployed on the Nutanix platform is its Epic Electronic Health Record (EHR). EHRs are a key component of modern healthcare and the need for anywhere, anytime access to patient information represents a challenge to the healthcare industry to provide the infrastructure that can meet this growing demand. Nutanix worked with Epic in a lab environment to demonstrate success using Nutanix servers for deploying the Epic Hyperspace client via application deployment technologies.
“We see tremendous opportunities to drive value with Nutanix in the healthcare industry by helping customers like St. Luke’s deliver better patient care through improved access to electronic healthcare records,” said Calvin Hsu, vice president of product marketing, Desktop and Apps, Citrix. “The Nutanix plug-in for Citrix XenDesktop, which has been validated as Citrix Ready, combines the benefits of Nutanix VM-centric functionality with Citrix Machine Creation Services for improved data protection, it will be even easier for us to work in partnership to bring even more benefits to customers like St. Luke’s.”
Another benefit that Nutanix provides for organizations deploying EHR applications like St. Luke’s is an additional layer of data security to enable compliance with the requirements for safeguarding protected health information (PHI). According to the Fourth Annual Benchmark Study on Patient Privacy & Data Security from The Ponemon Institute and sponsored by ID Experts, the loss or theft of computing devices accounted for 49% of all data breaches last year. In legacy systems, employees and third party contractors would be provided with physical devices that were susceptible to loss and theft. To reduce this threat with Nutanix, PHI is safeguarded in the data center with data at rest encryption technology, mitigating the chance of theft and corresponding fines associated with the Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations.
Resources
- To download the detailed Nutanix case study on St. Luke’s, go here.
- To see Nutanix’s explanation of web-scale infrastructure, go here.
- To download the Nutanix solution brief for Epic EHR, go here.
- To read the blog “Nutanix Arrives as a Mainstream Datacenter Player”, go here.
- Announced at Citrix Summit 2015, the Nutanix plug-in for Citrix XenDesktop enables IT administrators to set service level agreements for individual virtual desktops through the commonly used XenDesktop studio. For more information about the native plug-in, go here.
About Saint Luke’s Hospital System
Founded as a six-bed frontier hospital in 1902, St. Luke’s Health System (SLHS) has evolved to become Idaho’s largest healthcare provider. Today, St. Luke’s is the only locally governed, Idaho-based, not-for-profit health system, with a network of seven full service hospitals and more than 150 outpatient centers and clinics serving people throughout southern Idaho, eastern Oregon, and northern Nevada. Our mission is to improve the health of the people in our regions by providing access to a full range of effective and efficient health care and related services.
About Nutanix
Nutanix delivers web-scale IT infrastructure to medium and large enterprises with its software-driven Virtual Computing Platform, natively converging compute and storage into a single solution to drive unprecedented simplicity in the datacenter. Customers can start with a few servers and scale to thousands, with predictable performance and economics. With a patented elastic data fabric and consumer-grade management, Nutanix is the blueprint for application-optimized and policy-driven infrastructure. Learn more at www.nutanix.com or follow up on Twitter @nutanix.
