Flexible IT gives organizations broad options to adapt to meet future requirements while deploying infrastructure to support digital transformation, the digital workplace, data analytics and other business-critical priorities. IT can use hybrid cloud, on-premises infrastructure, public cloud and edge computing in various combinations, particularly with solutions from VMware and Dell Technologies that deliver a consistent management experience across all platforms.
For applications where performance and security cannot be compromised, Flexible IT is a necessity, not a luxury. IT must be able to decide which deployment model is right for each workload and use case. It must ensure that, in pursuit of performance, it is not compromising any other enterprise-grade requirement, whether that is security, business continuity, regulatory compliance, mobility, data protection or application availability.
This article examines four organizations where performance and security are a priority, outlining how each was able to address its challenges with modern Flexible IT solutions.
TGen: TGen, the Translational Genomics Research Institute, an affiliate of City of Hope, is a nonprofit medical research institute dedicated to conducting groundbreaking research with life-changing results. The Arizona-based institute works to unravel the genetic components of common and complex diseases, including COVID, cancer, neurological disorders, infectious disease and rare childhood disorders. The institute’s most recent technology upgrade is a supercomputer based on Dell EMC PowerEdge servers, offering the processing power of 3,000 Intel Xeon compute cores. The cluster delivers 1 million CPU hours per month and performs 50 trillion operations per second. The genomics sequencing system offers more than 3 petabytes of Dell EMC Isilon scale-out network-attached storage. The solution greatly accelerates the speed of genomic sequencing and cuts the data processing time from two weeks with the earlier-generation system to just seven to eight hours. The Dell technology is key to empowering TGen to move massive amounts of data quickly, manage it securely and process it intelligently. VMware is also playing a key role in supporting seamless workload migration between public and private clouds, enabling TGen to move computational workloads to where the data resides, thus facilitating even greater performance improvements.
Sentara: Sentara Healthcare is a large regional not-for-profit system that includes more than 300 sites in Virginia and Northeastern North Carolina; a regional air ground medical transport; a clinically integrated network; the Sentara College of Health Sciences; and a health plan that serves nearly a million members. The organization was looking for a partner to help it modernize and extend its current infrastructure to the edge, with the goal of shaving critical seconds off response times to save lives and protect health. Sentara partnered with Dell Technologies and VMware for a wide range of solutions, including PowerEdge servers, vSAN, iDRAC, OpenManage Enterprise and more. The solutions are delivering sub-millisecond response times to support life-saving use cases, such as images of brain X-rays for stroke patients. What’s more, the multi-cloud solution implemented by Dell and VMware has freed up resources so the organization no longer needs to manage storage and security and can now focus more on innovation.
EBM: 3D building models require huge graphics and computing capacity. That’s why German engineering firm EBM Ingenieurgesellschaft was looking for a high-performance, easily scalable virtualization solution for its workstations. The latency had to be as low as possible despite the demanding workloads. EBM chose Dell EMC PowerEdge server R740 with Intel Xeon Gold 6146 processors and NVIDIA P40 graphics cards, along with the VMware virtualization software stack and VMware Horizon View 7 for desktop virtualization. As a result, the organization has achieved low latency despite the performance demands of its 3D workloads and is positioned to scale for the future as performance and data requirements continue to increase in the building design and civil engineering industry.
Medacist: Medacist empowers healthcare providers in acute, specialty and long-term care facilities in the U.S. to gain operational insight and keep patients and hospitals safe with data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI). The company was seeking a cloud-enabled infrastructure that could support latency-sensitive analytical and AI workloads at the fastest possible speeds and with unfaltering reliability and security. It chose Dell EMC PowerEdge servers, Dell EMC PowerScale storage, Dell EMC OpenManage Enterprise, Dell EMC iDRAC, VMware vCenter Server and VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus. Medacist can now deliver analytics within 5 minutes of receiving data instead of 24 hours with prior solutions. In addition, the company saves millions of dollars by upholding 99.99% uptime service-level agreements. The solutions support Medacist’s Kubernetes environment, with the ability to run machine learning workloads on NVIDIA GPUs, resulting in cost savings on both hardware and operational overhead. The partnership with Dell Technologies, VMware and NVIDIA allows Medacist to take advantage of the full breadth and depth of their portfolio, including compute, storage, networking and security solutions.
Taking the Next Step
While your organization may not need the high-performance computing system required by TGen, the low latency environment of Sentara or the AI engines of Medacist, you probably have many key applications that will benefit from performance improvements and a streamlined, secure infrastructure, particularly in leveraging more data to improve the customer experience and empower the digital workplace. For more information on how you can use Flexible IT to improve and ensure peak performance and security, please visit Dell Technologies Solutions for VMware.
