Woman’s Hospital Data Center Case Study

As one of the premier healthcare providers in the country, Woman’s Hospital (Woman’s) prides itself on being at the forefront of patient care and technology. So when their data center environment began to fall short of expectations, they knew it was time to explore other options. Lockstep was able to help Woman’s build and implement a private cloud with dedicated fiber connectivity that not only improved their IT capabilities and capacity, but also freed up capital budget to be reinvested into providing better patient care.

The situation, needs, and challenges

Like many hospitals, Woman’s historically purchased IT infrastructure through capital expenditures (CapEx) and depreciated the equipment over time. Although this approach had its advantages, budgetary constraints often made it difficult for them to expand capacity or upgrade multiple infrastructure components in the same budgetary period. Additionally, Woman’s felt like they were in a seemingly endless cycle of spending more money for the same capabilities year over year with no added benefits. They tried to combat these challenges by augmenting their data center needs with an offsite provider, but quickly ran into challenges:

• • Low Availability: A critical SaaS application hosted in the offsite data center became less available than when it was onsite.

• • Limited Redundancy: Their offsite data center was connected through a single link, so if it went down, their apps would as well.

• • Time-consuming Backups: Backups took too long, were complicated, and required significant oversight from Woman’s IT team.

• • Vendor Capabilities: Their vendor wasn’t always able to meet their needs or support requests that weren’t on their line card.

Woman’s found themselves at a crossroad when they again needed to expand their compute/storage capacity. Knowing they didn’t have the capital budget to purchase more onsite hardware and that their vendor couldn’t provide adequate bandwidth if they moved more workloads offsite, they reached out to Lockstep for some expert advice.

The Lockstep solution

Following an in-depth consultation with key members of Woman’s IT team, Lockstep proposed a private cloud solution hosted in their state-of-the-art data center, connected through dedicated fiber. Because Woman’s would be consuming this solution as-a-service, it would allow them to move technology to an operational expense (OpEx) where they were essentially leasing the equipment rather than paying for it through their capital budget. This enabled them to upgrade both compute and storage capacity in the same fiscal year, simplify budgeting, improve their backup capabilities, and gain the redundancy that was needed for their hospital.

• • Dedicated Dark Fiber Ring: Dedicated fiber connectivity would allow Woman’s to increase their Quality of Service (QoS), improve uptime, and avoid costly bandwidth charges as they moved more workloads to their offsite data center.

• • Cisco and NetApp Flexpod AF200 cluster: Hosted in Lockstep’s data center, the all-flash Flexpod cluster provided a validated architecture for a robust, scalable private cloud that enabled them to transform their data center environment.

• • Veeam Backup: Veeam software and NetApp snapshot technology were implemented to create a more modern, efficient, and easy-to-use backup solution that required limited oversight from Woman’s IT team.

Chuck Smith, VP of Engineering for Lockstep, worked hand-in-hand with Woman’s during the entirety of the migration, providing expertise, ideas, and insight along the way. He and the Lockstep team were able to move Woman’s salient workloads to their private cloud within just a few weeks, enabling them to achieve fast time to value. Along with the immediate IT benefits, business decision-makers quickly realized value as well, thanks to the new financial model for technology investments.

The results and ultimate benefits

Along with improving their IT capacity and capabilities, Lockstep’s private cloud solution enabled Woman’s to free up capital budget to invest in better patient care. In fact, the move freed up nearly $750k, which was invested into new infrastructure and capabilities for the hospital. Thanks to the shift from CapEx to OpEx, the hospital is paying close to the same amount over time, but gaining faster access to the latest technology without having to invest in new hardware onsite. They are also set up for future growth and change thanks to the inherent scalability and fiber connectivity to Lockstep’s data center.
Woman’s Hospital was able to check a significant number of boxes for things they didn’t have before and are experiencing some great IT, business, and patient care benefits:

IT benefits:

• Setup for future growth and change thanks to the solutions’ scalability and dedicated connectivity
• Freedom to move and spread workloads throughout their on-and-offsite data center environments
• Ability to expand the life of their onsite hardware without needing to replace it
• Accelerated long-term plans to transition critical workloads from 6+ year-old legacy blade servers, ultimately extending their life by running less critical tasks like scripting
• Incredibly lower RTOs / RPOs across all workloads and hospital applications

Hospital benefits

• Freed up $750k in CapEx budget to invest in equipment that would improve the quality of patient care
• Simplified budgeting and the ability to align maintenance agreements with their fiscal calendar
• Downtime for backups went from hours to just minutes for one of their critical hospital applications
• Improved redundancy and peace of mind thanks to dedicated fiber connectivity
• Lower debt ratios due to significantly fewer capital expenditures on IT infrastructure

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