Medical Center Trims Budget by $600,000 by Switching to Hyper-V Private Cloud

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1 Medical Center Trims Budget by $600,000 by Switching to Hyper-V Private Customer: UConn Health Website: Number of Employees: 5000 Customer profile: St. UConn Health is a vibrant, integrated academic medical center that is entering an era of unprecedented growth in all three areas of its mission: academics, research, and clinical care. UConn Health is at the center of Bioscience Connecticut, a bold plan introduced by Connecticut Governor Dannel P. Malloy and approved by the Connecticut General Assembly in The plan will strengthen Connecticut s position as a national and global leader for bioscience innovation and improve access to quality health care for Connecticut citizens for generations to come. UConn Health, a healthcare provider in central Connecticut, wanted to reduce costs and modernize its datacenter. With help from Infront Consulting Group, it is migrating its large VMware infrastructure to a private cloud built on the Hyper-V technology in Windows Server 2012 R2. UConn Health will avoid more than US$600,000 in VMware licensing fees over five years, halve its server count, trim IT management costs by a third, improve the availability of clinical and business applications, and speed server delivery. UConn Health is a leading academic medical center in the northeastern United States whose mission spans clinical care, medical education, and research. Based in Farmington, Connecticut, UConn Health is home to the School of Medicine, School of Dental Medicine, John Dempsey Hospital, UConn Medical Group, UConn Health Partners, University Dentists, and a thriving research enterprise. With approximately 5,000 employees, UConn Health is a major economic driver in the region, providing nearly US$1 billion in services annually. It is closely linked with the University of Connecticut main campus in Storrs through multiple, cross-campus academic projects.

2 Medical Center Trims Budget by $600,000 by Switching to Hyper-V Private 2 With the Nutanix and Microsoft Hyper- V solution, we can deliver servers to the business in a matter of days, enabling Jabil s continued growth. Once our self- service portal is fully deployed, delivery time could shrink to minutes or hours. The Jabil IT team helps our internal customers get resources much faster, which empowers our business groups to make things happen faster for our customers. It s a powerful combination all around. Anton Heyward, IT Systems Architect at Jabil 2 UConn Health receives its funding from the state of Connecticut, and when Connecticut trimmed its budget beginning in 2010, UConn Health needed to follow suit by trimming its operating costs. Dass Sinnappen joined UConn Health in 2013 as Director of Information Technology in Network and Systems Services. As he surveyed the hospital s datacenter assets looking for cost-cutting opportunities, his gaze rested on VMware virtualization software, which the hospital had used to virtualize about 300 servers. While VMware had enabled significant server consolidation, those gains came at a price: VMware licensing had cost the hospital more than $600,000 over the previous five years. We were already paying for the license to Hyper-V virtualization technology in the Windows Server operating system, and with Windows Server 2012 R2, Hyper-V had all the capabilities that we needed, says Sinnappen.

3 Medical Center Trims Budget by $600,000 by Switching to Hyper-V Private 3 3 Getting off VMware was a logical way to realize a big cost reduction. However, Sinnappen was concerned about the effort and downtime dangers of migrating hundreds of VMware virtual machines to Hyper-V. These machines ran everything from financial software to fetal monitors, and downtime was unacceptable. UConn Health owned a range of VMware versions and a variety of Windows Server versions mostly Windows Server 2003 but also Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server UConn Health was afraid that upgrading this complex, diverse environment to the Windows Server 2012 R2 operating system would disrupt the business. But the benefits were irresistible and extended beyond cost savings. We needed better application monitoring tools, Sinnappen says. Keeping our critical clinical applications running and performing well took a lot of manual attention, as we had limited visibility into what was happening in the VMware host servers. UConn Health also saw an opportunity to enhance data protection by taking advantage of replication technologies built into Windows Server 2012 R2. The medical center had disaster protection for critical workloads using the replication capabilities of its HP 3PAR storage area network, but this technology was too expensive to extend to all workloads. Lastly, the IT organization saw an opportunity to move beyond virtualization to a true private cloud environment, which would help it speed up the delivery of IT resources to the business. We wanted ondemand, automated capacity expansion, which was the only way to keep up with rising demand for IT services without expanding our staff, Sinnappen says. UConn Health sought outside help for its migration from VMware to Hyper-V and at the same time began to create the hardware foundation for its private cloud. It used 26 HP ProLiant GL380 G8 servers for the private cloud and installed Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter on them. It also deployed Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 to gain automated private cloud management tools. We already owned the licensing for all of these products, so it made sense to bring everything up to the latest version and take full advantage of the technology that Microsoft was making available to us, Sinnappen says. Automated Migration from VMware to Hyper-V UConn Health looked at several VMwareto-Hyper-V migration processes and vendors. It had limited time and money to migrate hundreds of virtual machines and terabytes of data to its cloud environment.

4 4 Medical Center Trims Budget by $600,000 by Switching to Hyper-V Private With the Nutanix and Microsoft Hyper- V solution, we can deliver servers to the business in a matter of days, enabling Jabil s continued growth. Once our self- service portal is fully deployed, delivery time could shrink to minutes or hours. The Jabil IT team helps our internal customers get resources much faster, which empowers our business groups to make things happen faster for our customers. It s a powerful combination all around. Anton Heyward, IT Systems Architect at Jabil 4 To migrate terabytes of data from a storage system, you usually have to shut down the VMware VM [virtual machine] and convert all the data to Hyper-V, which can involve hours of downtime, Sinnappen says. We could not afford downtime for many of our clinical systems. All our VMs had to remain up and running during the migration. UConn Health chose Infront Consulting Group as its migration partner because of the company s deep experience in no-downtime Hyper-V migrations. Infront Consulting is a member of the Microsoft Partner Network and boasts special expertise in System Center. Infront Consulting helped UConn Health create a VMware-to-HyperV migration plan, set up the Hyper-V infrastructure, and implement a rapid and repeatable migration process.

5 Medical Center Trims Budget by $600,000 by Switching to Hyper-V Private 5 3 Infront Consulting recommended using a version of the Microsoft Migration Automation Toolkit (MAT) called MAT4SHIFT, which takes advantage of technology from NetApp s Project Shift to speed the migration process. MAT4SHIFT is a toolkit for automating migrations from VMware to Hyper-V using NetApp s storage technology. By using the NetApp platform, customers can quickly shift a workload from VMware to Hyper-V. It is a file-based storage platform that very efficiently stores virtual machines and converts them in seconds between various disk formats for various hypervisors. Infront customized MAT4SHIFT to accommodate the complex VMware configurations and older versions of VMware used by UConn Health. By using MAT4SHIFT with NetApp, we were able to convert VMs that were as large as 1.2 terabytes in about 30 minutes versus the two to four hours that it would have taken using other methods, Sinnappen says. New Streamlined Private Environment To date, UConn Health has migrated about 100 VMware virtual machines to Hyper-V and has several hundred more to go, with plans to completely retire VMware by the end of The IT organization has also created about 100 new virtual machines in its Hyper-V private cloud. The goal is to run every workload that can be virtualized in the Hyper-V cloud, from clinical applications to building security systems, websites, and file servers. One critical and large application running in the cloud is the hospital s operating room system, which manages operating room usage. This application is critical, because it coordinates all details about the surgeries performed here, from patient data to xrays, lab reports, scheduling information, and equipment needed, Sinnappen says. It s a large, transaction-heavy application, and it s running perfectly in our Hyper-V cloud. Some clinical groups initially objected to having their applications moved to HyperV, concerned that the applications would not be supported by or run well on HyperV. We simply asked them to give Hyper- V a chance. If their application didn t run well on Hyper-V, we would move it back to VMware, Sinnappen says. This approach allowed us to move forward with migrating about three-quarters of our clinical systems to Hyper-V, with more on the way. In fact, because we upgraded our iscsi network to fiber channel at the same time, most of these applications saw a performance speedup after the migration. So our clinical groups are very happy. (iscsi stands for the Internet small computer system interface.) Redundancy Built into Operating System UConn Health is taking advantage of the live migration feature in Windows Server 2012 R2 to move running virtual machines from one host server to another without interrupting uptime.

6 Medical Center Trims Budget by $600,000 by Switching to Hyper-V Private 6 With the Nutanix and Microsoft Hyper- V solution, we can deliver servers to the business in a matter of days, enabling Jabil s continued growth. Once our self- service portal is fully deployed, delivery time could shrink to minutes or hours. The Jabil IT team helps our internal customers get resources much faster, which empowers our business groups to make things happen faster for our customers. It s a powerful combination all around. Anton Heyward, IT Systems Architect at Jabil 2 It is also using HyperV Replica, a replication technology built into Windows Server 2012 R2, to gain more flexible and cost-effective backup, recovery, and disaster avoidance solutions. The inclusion of asynchronous replication in the operating system at no extra cost means that UConn Health can move virtual machines to remote datacenters regardless of the underlying storage platform. This enables UConn Health to create and store images of key applications in alternate locations using virtually any accessible disk storage, including inexpensive direct-attached storage. We re currently using Hyper-V Replica to gain application redundancy and will soon use it for disaster recovery, Sinnappen says. We have created a clustered system with shared storage. If a server is having a problem, we can migrate its VMs to a different host server with no interruption, using System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager to monitor every step of the process.

7 Medical Center Trims Budget by $600,000 by Switching to Hyper-V Private 7 5 Management Tool with Extensive Automation By using Operations Manager, UConn Health has deeper insight into what is going on with its entire infrastructure, including physical servers, virtual machines, and applications. The ability to monitor performance of both VMs and host servers is critical to application performance monitoring and something that we didn t have with VMware. In addition to Operations Manager, UConn Health uses Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 Configuration Manager to deploy software and security updates and Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager to automate virtual machine deployment. Benefits By switching from VMware to Hyper-V, UConn Health will avoid $600,000 in VMware license fees over five years. It will also be able to halve physical server costs and improve datacenter management efficiency, reducing management costs by as much as a third. With improved monitoring and new replication technologies, UConn Health has improved the availability of clinical and business applications, which contributes to improved staff productivity and patient experiences. The IT staff can deliver IT services in hours rather than days with the highly automated private cloud environment, which helps hospital business groups deploy new healthcare, teaching, and research applications and services sooner. Avoiding more than $600,000 in VMware licensing fees over five years is a significant win for the UConn Health IT organization. Standardizing on Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2 for virtualization and management also reduces the need for costly VMware training. Microsoft products have leapt forward such that they are every bit as competitive as VMware at a fraction of the cost, Sinnappen says. Switching to Hyper-V was a no-brainer from a cost-cutting perspective. We already own the licensing for all these Microsoft products, so it doesn t make sense to pay double with another vendor. Halve Server Count, Trim IT Management Costs by a Third- The savings continue with reductions in hardware and datacenter management costs. By creating a Hyper-V private cloud, UConn Health has been able to consolidate its hardware more deeply by virtualizing at greater densities. Sinnappen estimates that this will enable the hospital to halve its total number of physical servers by As an example, we consolidated 20 physical print servers to 2 physical servers, a consolidation level we were not able to achieve with VMware, Sinnappen says.

8 8 Medical Center Trims Budget by $600,000 by Switching to Hyper-V Private With the Nutanix and Microsoft Hyper- V solution, we can deliver servers to the business in a matter of days, enabling Jabil s continued growth. Once our self- service portal is fully deployed, delivery time could shrink to minutes or hours. The Jabil IT team helps our internal customers get resources much faster, which empowers our business groups to make things happen faster for our customers. It s a powerful combination all around. Anton Heyward, IT Systems Architect at Jabil 6 Sinnappen expects to also reduce datacenter management costs as staff becomes more familiar with System Center 2012 R2. By using better monitoring systems and server consolidation, the IT staff is productive and proactive, he says. We have more time to plan projects and be more agile for the Health Center s growing needs. Keep Applications Available at All Times With System Center 2012 R2- the UConn Health IT staff has much better insight into both clinical and productivity applications such as . With the insights we receive from Operations Manager, all of our applications run more reliably and faster, which directly affects patient well-being and staff productivity, Sinnappen says. Moving running workloads using live migration and replicating workloads using Hyper-V Replica also helps UConn Health prevent critical applications from ever being unavailable.

9 Medical Center Trims Budget by $600,000 by Switching to Hyper-V Private 9 7 We had a virtual machine fail the other day, but we were able to migrate the workload without interruption to another VM, and in less than three hours have another host server up and running, Sinnappen says. Deliver Servers in Hours Versus Days- The lean UConn Health IT staff is not only far more efficient with its Hyper-V private cloud but also more responsive to the business. We can set up a Hyper-V serverfully loaded with needed applications in a couple of hours versus a day and a half, Sinnappen says. We don t have to go through the long process of building a physical server or a VMware VM. This helps the IT organization respond to business needs and get new applications into the hands of our clinicians and professors as soon as possible. The improvements that we ve made in our datacenter directly affect how quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively we can deliver care to our patients and education to our students. Transform the datacenter- The hybrid cloud from Microsoft transforms the datacenter by extending existing investments in skills and technology with public cloud services and a common set of management tools. With an on-premises infrastructure connected to the Microsoft Azure platform, you can deliver services faster and scale up or down quickly to meet changing needs. As a Microsoft Partner, Infront provides a level of technical expertise that is second to none in our industry. We are able to accelerate the deployment and configuration of Microsoft System Center technologies faster and more efficiently thanks to our technical depth and experience. Rory McCaw, CEO at Infront Consulting Group For more information about transforming the datacenter, go to: