Is Hyperconvergence Helpful for All Healthcare Organizations?

Hyperconverged infrastructure combines storage, computing and networking into a single system. This architecture, compared with traditional data centers, makes HCI cheaper to operate, easier to manage, more scalable and more agile. It’s no wonder that enterprises in just about every industry are migrating to HCI — and healthcare is no exception.

Transparency Market Research predicts the healthcare industry’s share of the HCI market to have a compound annual growth rate of nearly 42 percent through 2025.

This shift is partly the byproduct of two trends: the growing adoption of digital information storage systems and an increasing use of smartphone-based technologies for patient interaction, the firm says. For example, healthcare vendors such as Epic have spent the past few years making it easier to migrate applications such as electronic health records to an HCI environment.

HCI’s benefits to healthcare are still being realized, but the technology is worth the consideration of IT teams hoping to simplify their workloads, enhance performance and reduce system maintenance — even though its advantages might not be immediately obvious.

For instance, one hospital migrated its picture archiving and communication system (PACS) to a Nutanix HCI cluster. “PACS might seem like an odd candidate for virtualization,” says Logan Ayers, CDW principal inside solution architect for data centers. “But for them, eliminating the expense of owning and operating storage arrays made it worth the effort.”