Nutanix has announced that Cardinal Innovations Healthcare has standardized its infrastructure on the Nutanix enterprise cloud platform and has already eliminated $60,000 in VMware licensing fees using AHV.

As the largest specialty health plan in the United States, Cardinal Innovations Healthcare will now service its 720,000 members through an IT infrastructure based on hybrid and all-flash systems from Nutanix.

Using a legacy multi-tiered IT architecture for all its healthcare applications and services, the Cardinal Innovations IT team was juggling nine different products, all with separate contracts and licenses to manage. With these disparate products becoming difficult to manage and requiring forklift upgrades to scale, the company was looking to streamline its traditional infrastructure and used a recent merger with another healthcare company as an opportunity to undertake a datacenter overhaul.

After deciding to move to a hyperconverged environment, the Cardinal Innovations IT team determined Nutanix was the most complete solution of any of the vendors considered and the only one to eliminate the sprawling contracts it was looking to do away with. The company deployed 21 Nutanix nodes with a mix of hybrid and all-flash systems running AHV to power all enterprise workloads, accelerate its Citrix VDI environment and eliminate VMware virtualization licensing fees.

The Cardinal Innovations IT team also took advantage of Nutanix Prism’s simplified one-window management to streamline management, especially when no specialized teams for specific parts of the infrastructure were required. The team can now manage the entire infrastructure, including clusters running both AHV and ESXi, from a single window and reduce upgrade times from the two months it took using traditional infrastructure to just one day with one-click upgrades from Nutanix.

New users to Cardinal Innovations’ systems resulting from the merger were also assimilated much faster. Using the Nutanix-powered Citrix VDI solution, the company shipped pre-configured Chromebooks to new users, allowing them to connect immediately and reducing costs for IT support. With the migration to Nutanix, the company also drastically eliminated VMware licensing fees, adding an additional savings of up to $60,000 per year.

“The Nutanix enterprise cloud platform allows us to move beyond being an IT enabler to become an initiator capable of executing whatever our users demand,” said Robert Edwards, Director of Technical Infrastructure, Cardinal Innovations Healthcare. “By reducing the number of vendors we have to work with and streamlining contract negotiations and support, Nutanix significantly simplifies management, and we receive nothing but rave reviews from our users since we moved away from a 3-tier environment. Nutanix is simply the best infrastructure experience for building and supporting a datacenter.”

“Facing new demands, IT departments need infrastructure solutions that can reduce cost and complexity while also delivering high performance and reliability,” said David Gwyn, Vice President, Americas East and Latin America at Nutanix. “We’re committed to helping our customers like Cardinal Innovations Healthcare transition their workloads to the Nutanix enterprise cloud platform, eliminating the challenges of traditional infrastructure so they can focus on delivering more value through the applications and services that power their business.”

Based on the speed and ease of use of the Nutanix enterprise cloud platform, it is now the de facto standard for Cardinal Innovations’ IT infrastructure. The company is slowly consolidating and replacing its remaining VMware licenses and 3-tier systems as they reach end of life or expire.

Resources:

• To learn more about Nutanix enterprise cloud solutions, click here.
• To learn more about Cardinal Innovations Healthcare’s Nutanix deployment, read our case study.