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Leading Healthcare Services Firm Consolidates From Disparate EMC VMAX and XtremIO Storage Silos to SmartStack Integrated Infrastructure; Simplifies Management and Achieves an 8x Reduction in Data Center Storage Footprint

CareCentrix, a leader in managing care to the home, prides itself on providing superior quality care for the 23 million Americans who have access to home care services coordinated by CareCentrix through its nationwide network of 8,000 credentialed provider locations. Delivering quality home healthcare is dependent on maintaining highly available and responsive access to IT environments by patients and providers. In order to advance on its initiative to leverage new technologies, CareCentrix has implemented the Nimble Storage (NYSE: NMBL) SmartStack integrated infrastructure solution, comprising the Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS®) integrated infrastructure and the Nimble Adaptive Flash platform, across its entire IT environment. The deployment of SmartStack now enables CareCentrix to eliminate storage silos, resulting in a reduction in its data center storage footprint and simplified management.

The company operates a nearly 100% virtualized IT environment within one core data center, and seven smaller call center locations. CareCentrix had been growing rapidly, due to recent expansion of its provider service business. “We needed the ability to quickly deploy and integrate new IT services, in order to provide the best possible care and support to our customers,” said Stanton Cole, storage and backup engineer at CareCentrix. “We had already adopted virtualization and cloud services, knowing that they would provide the most resiliency and the ability to quickly scale out as requirements change.”

CareCentrix deployed the Nimble Storage Adaptive Flash platform together with Veeam Enterprise Suite to meet its stringent data protection mandates. After deploying the Nimble solution for the backup environment, the CareCentrix IT team expanded its Nimble deployment across the firm’s IT environments.

The IT organization at CareCentrix was dealing with the complexity of managing three different storage platforms – EMC VMAX, Data Domain and XtremIO. With a desire to simplify management complexity and consolidate applications and workloads, CareCentrix installed SmartStack integrated infrastructure. CareCentrix successfully migrated all of the firm’s production VMs, QA, and development environments to the refreshed IT environment. This migration to a consolidated environment enabled CareCentrix to reduce its storage footprint 8x, from 252U of VMAX to just 30U with Nimble, slash annual storage maintenance and power costs by 8x, increase system performance and overall flexibility, and dramatically simplify management with a single platform for backup for its tier 1 and tier 2 storage and production workloads.

“We moved our 12TB Oracle data warehouse from the VMAX onto a Nimble array,” Cole reported. “The performance was simply amazing,” added Cole. “One of our massive ETL reports that previously took 8 to 10 hours to run on the VMAX finished in less than 5 hours on the Nimble array. We are also getting 2 1/2 to 3X compression across our databases.”

The CareCentrix IT team was not only impressed with the increased performance and back up capabilities, the cost savings blew them away. The ongoing financial and resource savings from the consolidation is being focused on driving strategic IT projects used to streamline and enhance the payer, provider and especially the CareCentrix patient experience. “Nimble was a game changer for our business, I knew it would be,” concluded Cole.