The Client
The client is a national, privately held medical billing company specializing in radiology clients. Founded in 1982 by radiology professionals, the client’s goal is to provide highest quality services in a cost effective manner, while maintaining focus on individual client needs.
The Challenge
The client has always been at the forefront of technology, and invested heavily in expanding its’ on-premise technology footprint and staying at the forefront. The company develops and maintains its’ own, proprietary software, as well as a number of complex, database driven off the shelf applications. Due to compliance requirements, data has to be archived for a number of years. Further, there was a mix of heterogeneous operating systems – Windows, Linux and Unix variants. All of this has caused the number of physical servers and storage to grow over the years. Warranty renewals became costly, and computing resources were scattered and not well utilized. Capital expenditures had to be made for constant server and storage upgrades. Disaster recovery was getting harder to orchestrate.
The Solution
Instead of relying on expanding the current server footprint, the client decided to move to a private cloud solution, and tapped its’ longtime IT partner StratusPointIT to design and implement it. Private cloud would allow better computing resource utilization, easier provisioning and reduced overall cost per compute unit. StratusPointIT looked at both Microsoft Hyper-V and VMWare products, and chose VMWare, mainly because of its better support for multiple operating systems.
The Results
StratusPointIT engineering was able to architect a highly available private cloud solution based on VMWare product set. The project involved virtualizing or rebuilding many key server roles, including SQL, Exchange, file and domain, web. In addition, StratusPointIT’s worked with the client’s development resources to virtualize the proprietary line of business application. The server footprint has been reduced, as well as the overall hardware and infrastructure costs. Further, the primary objective of reducing DR complexity and enabling easy provisioning has been achieved.
