servers, and health care applications including ... storage systems running 150 server VMs. Primary ... systems and dedi
Case Study
Institution
Central Washington Hospital Eliminates Performance Bottlenecks for Key Health Care Applications with Tintri
Central Washington Hospital
Industry Health care
Location Wenatchee, WA
Virtualization environment • •
VMware® vSphere™ 5.0 Dell R610 servers for vSphere hosts
•
Prior to Tintri: Dell EqualLogic iSCSI SAN
VM profile •
Windows 2008 R2 running file and print servers, SQL server, Exchange, IIS Web servers, and health care applications including nurse call systems, dietary and anatomical pathology test systems.
Key challenges • •
•
Poor storage performance affected critical applications’ usability. Storage software upgrades were challenging, time-consuming and required downtime. Performance was insufficient for a VDI project.
Tintri solution Two Tintri VMstore™ T540 dual-controller storage systems running 150 server VMs.
Primary use case Server virtual machines running missioncritical hospital applications such as nurse call systems.
Business benefits: • • •
Reliable, fast performance improved their application usability. Simplified storage management and troubleshooting with VM-level visibility. Fast, non-disruptive upgrades eliminated downtime.
Overview Based in Wenatchee, WA, Central Washington Hospital (CWH) has served the north central Washington community for more than 100 years with a mission to deliver excellent, cost-effective health care. CWH provides a variety of services including inpatient and outpatient surgery, coronary and intensive care, and respiratory care. Storage performance issues affected business-critical applications, such as nurse call systems and cardiology and surgery applications, leading to user complaints and decreased productivity. Maintaining existing storage systems was also difficult as it required careful planning and downtime for software upgrades. CWH’s IT wanted to replace the existing storage with a solution that would satisfy the performance needs of its business-critical applications and simplify management and maintenance.
Key Customer Challenges CWH used iSCSI block-storage to support its critical hospital applications running in a virtual environment. “Performance of our existing storage caused issues with our applications’ accessibility, leading to user complaints. The existing storage was getting long in the tooth and we wanted to replace it with a high-performance flash-based storage system,” said David Scirratt, IT infrastructure manager at CWH. “Another major issue with our existing storage was maintenance. Even with careful planning, software upgrades were time-intensive, affected performance and required downtime, which presented problems for us, as we are a 24x7 operation,” said Johnathan Rider, system administrator at CWH. CWH deployed vFoglight to help troubleshoot storage performance problems with its virtual infrastructure. ”Troubleshooting VM performance problems involved lots of guesswork and correlating multiple data points, so we wanted a storage solution that made it easier,” said Rider. “We also knew that it was not going to be possible to deploy VDI on our existing storage. It clearly wouldn’t meet our performance requirements. So, we wanted to select a storage platform which would allow us to deploy VDI workloads at a later time,” said Scirratt. ”We wanted the storage system to support both VDI and server workloads without degrading performance and affecting the end-user experience.”
Case Study: Central Washington Hospital “Tintri lived up to our expectations and delivered high performance in a system that is easy to manage. It just works.” — David Scirratt IT infrastructure manager at CWH
Tintri Delivers Performance for Mission-Critical Applications “We had two main criteria for storage for our mission-critical virtualized applications. First, we wanted a high-performance, cost-effective storage system. Second, we wanted storage that simplified management and maintenance,” said Scirratt. “We were introduced to Tintri by our solution provider, Ivoxy, and we decided to do a POC.” “Setting up Tintri VMstore was a breeze,” said Rider. “That gave us the confidence to immediately move some our production workloads to Tintri so we could test performance and management simplicity. Tintri lived up to our expectations.” CWH’s deployment consists of Dell R610 servers, two Tintri VMstore T540 systems and dedicated network infrastructure.
Business Benefits With Tintri, CWH eliminated performance issues that had plagued its critical health care applications. “We are running over150 business-critical server VMs on two Tintri T540 VMstore systems with no end-user complaints about performance,” said Scirratt. “We have moved entire virtual infrastructure on to Tintri and still have performance available to add more VMs.” Tintri also helped CWH simplify management with native VM-level visibility. “We don’t need to rely on external management tools to get direct visibility into VM-level performance at the storage layer,” said Rider. “Tintri provides performance troubleshooting at the VM-level; we don’t need to do guesswork and correlate data across multiple sources to identify issues.” “With Tintri, software upgrades are flawless. We have no downtime and experience no performance impact. In a 24x7 operation like ours, this is very important and allows us to perform maintenance even in the middle of the day,” said Rider. “Tintri works as advertised and solved a lot of issues we’ve experienced with other storage.”
Looking for Tintri in the Future “We know we can successfully virtualize hundreds of desktops with Tintri,” said Scirratt. “We look to deploy VDI on Tintri in the very near future.”
Summary With Tintri’s VM-aware storage platform, CWH met the performance requirements of its mission-critical applications and increased user productivity. CWH has also been able to simplify storage management and troubleshooting with Tintri’s VM-level metrics, eliminating the need for guesswork. “Tintri lived up to our expectations and delivered high performance in a system that is easy to manage. It just works,” said Scirratt.
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