Nutanix a leader in private cloud, hybrid and multicloud computing, has announced that United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) selected Nutanix as part of the organization’s effort to build a scalable and resilient hybrid cloud environment. This helps power UNOS’ mission of uniting and strengthening the donation and transplant community to save lives. 

As the non-profit organization serving as the United States’ organ transplant system under contract with the federal government, UNOS brings together hundreds of organ donation and transplantation professionals and thousands of volunteers to constantly improve the system. This collaboration helps increase the number of life-saving organ transplants each day and relies on a sophisticated technology infrastructure, which must support always-on availability of resource-intensive applications. Nutanix not only delivered on UNOS’ requirements, but also better prepared them for some of the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As the UNOS team embarked on a project to further upgrade its IT infrastructure, they were looking to bring together the performance and security benefits of private clouds, with the flexibility and technology stack of public clouds. UNOS selected Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure to power its private cloud environment as the best IT infrastructure that could meet the organization’s current needs along with the ability to expand and adapt in the future.

The team saw important gains after deploying Nutanix, marking an approximately 30% reduction in the time required to run data-intensive reports and analytics workloads —meaning faster availability of information for transplant professionals. In addition, performance improvements of similar caliber were seen in automated tests that continuously validate organ allocation algorithms changes.

Some of these improvements helped UNOS’ engineering teams to quickly respond to shifting clinical needs due to COVID-19.  In addition, as the number of COVID-19 infections surged across the U.S., transplant hospitals needed and received temporary relief for data submission requirements through rapid UNOS technology alterations.

“There are over 100,000 patients awaiting transplants today, and our IT mission is to make the organ matching process as seamless, efficient and effective as possible. Technology alone is not enough but it’s a vital enabler as lives truly depend on our system running 24/7,” said Alex Tulchinsky, Chief Technology Officer at UNOS. “Nutanix has been a game changer for us, powering our hybrid cloud environment and delivering the reliability, performance and scalability necessary to advance our mission. Of course, it’s a whole ecosystem of technology partners and transplant professionals that makes all of this possible, along with all the volunteers and organ donors nationwide.”

In addition to delivering reliability and scalability, Nutanix also offers the performance necessary to support UNetSM – UNOS’ resource-intensive organ matching and allocation technology platform. The match relies on complex allocation algorithms to match donated hearts, lungs, livers, intestines, pancreata, and kidneys to the tens of thousands of patients waiting on the list on any given day. Virtualizing on Nutanix has resulted in approximately 30% faster match run performance. In addition to the matching and allocation system, UNOS continues to move more critical workloads to Nutanix, including operational data stores, big data analytics and data visualization systems.

“UNOS has truly been able to harness technology innovation to support its mission and deliver a transplant system that minimizes the time transplant professionals spend on entering and managing data, and maximize the time spent on helping patients,” said Cheryl Rodenfels, Healthcare Strategist at Nutanix. “Not only this, they have been able to look at technology opportunities and find ways, with Nutanix and other partners, to maximize their existing resources so the UNOS team can spend more time on efforts to get more patients transplanted.”

To learn more about UNOS and its mission, visit unos.org. For more information about Nutanix healthcare solutions, please visit nutanix.com/healthcare.