Application Resource Management in Healthcare

Four Ways Healthcare Providers Have Benefited from Intersight Workload Optimizer

IT operations teams are like doctors. Doctors practice preventive medicine to help patients keep their health on track. When a patient’s health goes off track, the doctor minimizes symptoms through medication and rest, and they perform assessments to identify the root cause of the ailment.

In a similar way, IT operations teams keep their organizations’ mission-critical applications on track by providing computing, networking, and storage resources. Sometimes an application demonstrates symptoms indicating there’s something wrong (such as sluggish performance). If the root cause is serious enough and goes unaddressed, it can lead to downtime and impact the end user experience.

Treating the symptoms of poor application performance

Too often IT teams spend most of their time addressing the symptoms of underperforming applications or resuscitating them when they go offline. They’re alerted when there’s an issue, but they can’t easily pinpoint the root cause. This means the symptoms get treated to keep applications running, but the underlying cause or causes go untreated, which can lead to recurring application performance issues and costly staff time spent addressing them.

How to stay ahead of application resource issues

Application resource management solutions like Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer (IWO) provide vital capabilities to help IT teams prevent application resource issues from occurring while optimizing costs to control their budgets.

Here are four examples where Cisco healthcare customers used application resource management to maintain the health of their organizations’ applications in fiscally responsible ways.

1) Ensuring mission-critical application performance

A healthcare services provider was experiencing performance issues with mission-critical applications. They couldn’t identify where in the stack the issues were originating from, so they used AppDynamics and IWO to gain deep visibility from their applications through their underlying computing infrastructure, particularly into hundreds of virtual machines. The visibility showed them when application performance began to stretch VM workloads and how to optimize their virtual environment to ensure continuous resources for optimal application performance. In addition to providing continuous up-time for their mission-critical applications, the customer has used IWO to optimize workloads in the public cloud and reduce public cloud spend by 40%.

2) Maintaining application performance at a lower cost

1) In order to provide continuous application uptime, a healthcare provider in the midwestern United States uses on-premises infrastructure and hosting services through a public cloud provider. However, the costs for on-premises infrastructure and cloud resources were rising rapidly and not sustainable. Using IWO’s “what-if” scenario planning, Cisco worked with the client’s IT group to demonstrate how they could right-size new server purchases and identify the most cost-effective cloud resources to meet their budget requirements. As a result, the healthcare provider can continue to deliver computing resources to provide experiences their application users expect while delivering tangible cost savings.

2) A healthcare provider in the southeastern United States and Cisco UCS customer needed to improve overall infrastructure availability, specifically by getting better insight into the real-time status of VMs and other computing resources. With a restricted IT budget, they also needed to extend the life of existing systems to reduce their CapEx expenses. Using IWO, the healthcare provider identified an opportunity to reduce the number of hosts by 50% while maintaining the same levels of utilization and avoiding unnecessary CapEx investments. At the same time, the healthcare provider used IWO to ensure workload configurations comply with its policies, which has helped the customer improve its HIPAA compliance posture.

3) Conducting an EHR cloud migration analysis

This healthcare provider needed to refresh its Epic hyperspace environment for its primary electronic health record (EHR) system. Their IT team was considering moving to the EHR provider’s cloud-based IaaS solution. The Cisco team used IWO to conduct a detailed total cost of ownership (TCO)/return on investment (ROI) analysis. The study showed the ability to maintain desired application performance with fewer servers (and less cost) than the EHR provider prescribed. The analysis revealed the healthcare provider would save $500,000 per month over three years, or $18 million, by using an on-premises UCS solution instead of the hosted solution. The healthcare provider also went on to use IWO to continue optimizing its virtual environment for ongoing application resource management and cost containment.

Keep your applications in shape through application resource management

As a healthcare provider, your patients, caregivers, and others rely on your applications. With solutions like IWO at your disposal, you have the power to adopt best practices in application resource management and ensure uptime to deliver the experiences your users expect while gaining cost-containment capabilities. Rise above treating the symptoms of an ailing infrastructure; exercise proactive application resource management with Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer to keep your applications and infrastructure in outstanding shape.

Source: cisco.com