Case Study

DH2i Helps Asante Strengthen Its Position in a Competitive Healthcare Environment

An Agile Solution for Inevitable Growth

It’s an eat-or-be-eaten environment in the world of healthcare, and changing market demands are taking a toll on the IT departments of organizations everywhere. New mandates like electronic medical record adoption and online health management offerings require new services to be spun up rapidly. In addition, competitive pressures mean budgets are tight and IT needs to accomplish more with fewer resources. Asante’s experience has been no different.

DH2I

Main Challenges

Like other organizations, Asante looked to virtualization to solve many of its datacenter challenges. They needed to consolidate, control costs and achieve higher availability for their business-critical systems. While virtualization did provide some wins, there were still workloads that could not be collapsed — particularly SQL Server applications that required multiple servers for high availability. Because of the business-critical nature of these applications, vendors were building clusters and large over-the-top SQL Servers with lots of redundancy and high availability. This ultimately led to some big issues for Asante with excessive licensing costs and SQL Server sprawl.

databses
Rampant SQL Server Sprawl
High SQL Server licensing costs
Growing Licensing Costs
DH2I
Need for Increased Agility

Solution and Results

Michael York of Asante identified DxEnterprise as an effective instance- level high availability solution, and a viable alternative to clusters for SQL Server applications. Similarly to their approach to virtualization, Asante started with low-hanging fruit to manage with DxEnterprise, but ultimately realized it was applicable across the datacenter.

Eventually, they were able to safely consolidate 15-20 instances per server—helping them save big on server overhead and licensing costs. Along with the massive consolidation benefits and enhancement in high availability, DxEnterprise also helped Asante eliminate operational and lifecycle headaches like patching. It even provided them the single solution needed to enable multi-subnet disaster recovery to protect Asante’s multiple locations. The best part—it could be implemented at any time, on any infrastructure.

We didn’t understand that we could scale back and use SQL Server better by safely stacking instances on the same box to get more out of our hardware. DxEnterprise does a much better job of running high-end workloads right where you need them, and with all the management capabilities built in. You’re not doing anything for your bottom line by running SQL Server in VMware. Today, if I build two physical SQL Enterprise servers, I’ve already saved money by building one with DxEnterprise, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars in fixed and recurring SQL Server costs. This is the easiest way to do stretched clusters.”

DH2I

Michael York
Senior Systems Engineer
IT Services, Asante

Benefits of DxEnterprise

savings

Saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing costs

benefits

Alleviated management stress and reduced operational lifecycle complications like patching

Disaster recovery technology

Created new revenue source: offering electronic medical record services to hospitals outside of Asante’s network

DH2I

Massive improvements in consolidation and availability

security

Gained disaster recover solutions with easy multi-subnet failover for multiple locations

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