Scale Computing Provides Ease of Use, High Availability and Increased Reliability to Healthcare Organizations

Scale Computing announced today it is experiencing increased demand for its HC3 virtualization platform across the healthcare industry.

The healthcare industry is consumed with the need to simplify the management of IT assets and reduce the time and effort expended on maintaining the current IT environment. Paris Community Hospital, Riverwood Healthcare Center, Costa Salud Community Health, and North Valley Hospital all faced significant IT challenges. These included a need to enable virtualization without complexity, improve availability of critical workloads, improve disaster recovery, and solve single vendor support of infrastructure, all while needing to meet an affordable price point.

Riverwood Healthcare Center has been providing care to residents of Aitkin County in Northern Minnesota for more than 60 years. Riverwood IT leadership turned to Scale Computing to help virtualize their operations and fortify their disaster recovery efforts with a single vendor. The Scale Computing HC3 solution simplified the center’s efforts, working across its entire infrastructure and reducing the time the Riverwood IT team spends managing its infrastructure by nearly 25%, and with a much smaller footprint.

Mike Kongsjord, IT administrator, Riverwood Healthcare Center, stated: “HC3 reduced time in implementation, making our response to requests more efficient, thus increasing satisfaction. Overall maintenance of the device is much less than supporting physical servers.”

Paris Community Hospital, part of Horizon Health, is a 25-bed critical-access hospital located in Paris, Illinois. It is a full-service provider that includes emergency medicine, surgery, rehabilitation services, radiology, diabetes education, and more. The company’s four-person IT team turned to Scale Computing to simplify the management of its IT assets and reduce the time and effort expended on maintaining the environment. Scale Computing HC3 provided a cost-effective way to simplify its IT infrastructure and VDI management as well as improved performance. It also delivered enhanced security and control and enabled rapid deployment of virtual desktops, cutting time-to-implementation from a week to two hours.

Edgar Weeks, information services manager, Paris Community Hospital, comments: “With the previous environment, the high cost of maintenance and replacement, as well as the overhead required to go through so many devices and workstations individually, was a serious issue for a small, lean organization like us. Scale Computing delivered a solution that has addressed all the challenges we faced more cost-effectively than all other options. We can add users faster, manage connections more effectively, provide better control over user access and deliver vastly improved security.”

North Valley Hospital, located in Washington state, strives to provide quality patient care and education that enhances the health and well-being of its communities. While struggling to find availability to accompany its critical workloads and enable virtualization without complexity, North Valley Hospital looked to Scale Computing. Scale Computing’s HC3 not only addressed those issues, but also improved disaster recovery. The high availability built into HC3 allowed North Valley Hospital to decrease the recovery time needed for a hardware failure running a critical workload, from 8-24 hours to less than 10 minutes (97-99% reduction in recovery time). In addition, after deploying HC3, the amount of time the IT staff spends managing infrastructure was reduced by 50-74%.

Carlos Antuna, IT manager, North Valley Hospital, commented: “HC3 reduced complexity and increased availability.”

“When it comes to IT, healthcare organizations face many of the same challenges as any other organization, including limited budgets and scalability. Healthcare organizations also face challenges related to storing, managing and protecting critical patient data and research data and keeping systems available to handle critical care,” said Jeff Ready, CEO and co-founder, Scale Computing. “Healthcare organizations of all types have been choosing HC3 hyperconverged infrastructure from Scale Computing to serve their IT infrastructure needs. HC3 offers simplicity, scalability, availability, and affordability to organizations who need to streamline operations with a reliable solution. Whether a healthcare organization is specialized in emergency services, mental health, medical imaging, research or any other aspect of care, HC3 is the smart choice.”

Costa Salud Community Health is located in Rincon, Puerto Rico. The health center’s general practitioners provide comprehensive, continuous and primary healthcare services to patients. Costa Salud Community Health was looking for a single vendor solution to support its infrastructure and improve disaster recovery, all at an affordable cost. It turned to Scale Computing’s HC3 for hypervisor licensing renewal and to support higher uptime SLAs for critical workloads. Thanks to its built-in high availability, HC3 decreased the time spent recovering from a hardware failure running a critical workload from 1-8 hours to less than 10 minutes (an 83-97% reduction in recovery time). Scale Computing’s solution also reduced the time the IT staff spends managing infrastructure by more than 75% after deployment of HC3.

Ismael Ruiz, IT vice president, Costa Salud Community Health, commented: “The Scale Computing solution was very interesting from the beginning. Employees do not need certifications to use the platform. Also, we do not have to be constantly upgrading. One opportunity we saw apart from the cost was support. No matter the time, a service engineer always helps us by phone in a short time. In our case, we evaluated a lot of products and HC3 was the best suited for our operations.”