Dell EMC World: Virtustream cloud launches for healthcare

New Dell EMC cloud storage has appeared on the horizon, providing a silver lining for IT-pressed healthcare shops.

Virtustream Healthcare Cloud, which launched this week at Dell EMC World 2017, is a secure compliance archive for electronic medical records. The Virtustream cloud is built on Pivotal Cloud Foundry software running atop Dell EMC storage.

The vendor said the Virtustream Healthcare Cloud hosts mission-critical data sets in a HIPAA-and HITECH-compliant environment, with managed services and guaranteed five nines of availability. Customers use software to tier data from on-premises Dell EMC storage to the Virtustream cloud.

“We’re looking to do the same things with the healthcare cloud that we’ve done in the SAP database world: consumption billing, performance with availability guarantees, built-in disaster recovery with RPOs and RTOs, and a full managed services capability on top,” said Matt Theurer, a Virtustream founder and its senior vice president of product management.

Startup Virtustream launched in 2009 to provide public cloud hosting of legacy applications that were not written for the cloud, such as SAP Hana. It became part of EMC via a 2015 acquisition. EMC subsequently ported its Rubicon project into the Virtustream cloud to create the Virtustream Storage Cloud object platform.

Rubicon turns the Virtustream cloud into a target for underlying Dell EMC storage through Isilon CloudPools, Data Domain CloudBoost and CloudArray for Dell EMC Unity and VMAX all-flash arrays.

Dell EMC also rolled out the Virtustream Enterprise Cloud Connector for the VMware vRealize Automation suite. Theurer said customers can use Virtustream as an endpoint for cloud bursting or tiering to support evolving availability, disaster recovery, performance and security requirements.