Cambio Healthcare Systems is one of Scandinavia's leading suppliers of healthcare information systems and a growing player in the European market with just over 170,000 users across general and university hospitals, specialist units and outpatient units. Striving to make a difference in society, Cambio is transforming the way healthcare is delivered by leveraging the most powerful technology solutions on the market today.

Cambio offers almost 30 years of experience providing results, quality and data-driven insight of a patient's condition through its robust product suite that incorporates solutions such as Cambio COSMIC, a comprehensive, interactive and dynamic patient-oriented data platform, Cambio CDC, connecting a wide range of medical devices to a single platform, and Cambio CDS, providing clinicians with intelligent and efficient support for treating patients. Cambio customers leverage these integrated solutions and more to serve over four million patients.

CONSOLIDATING STORAGE TO ONE CONSOLE
Serving customers with 750 employees in four different countries throughout the world, Cambio needed to centralise projects and consolidate its data centres from three locations to one. Cambio was using several types of storage solutions, including more general purpose systems from HP and Dell, to provide data storage to its customers to support the data generated from their solutions.

Each storage platform offered a different user interface and workflow, making it time consuming and frustrating for Cambio's IT team to manage. In addition, storage performance was very inefficient because the various systems were not optimised for each application.

"We clone virtual machines (VMs) almost every day and we spin up to about 50-100 machines every week. So, we needed storage solutions that were simple to set-up, intuitive to manage and able to deliver reliable performance," said Jan Adolfsson, infrastructure architect for Cambio Healthcare Systems. "With some of the storage we had in place, we found it very complex to set up and tedious to manage. The GUIs were really tiresome and would take a long time to execute a task. There weren't any good APIs, and we couldn't create custom scripts within each platform. So, we had to script using a manual process, which took hours."

Cambio and its customer base was quickly expanding, and its storage configuration could no longer handle its needs. While the company nearly doubled in size from around 450 to 800 employees over the last seven years, its IT workforce did not increase. This emphasised the importance of time-efficient workflows for Adolfsson's team. And, in order to successfully serve the vital healthcare industry, he knew he had to look into a better storage solution.

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"We looked into the Gartner Magic Quadrant and saw a name that we hadn't noticed before - Tintri - and decided to check them out. We compared Tintri's VMstore demo with our current storage systems and asked ourselves, 'Is this the way storage is supposed to work?'. We were initially worried that the product was too good to be true, but were happy to actually be able to clone VMs in seconds instead of hours."

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CLONING VMS IN SECONDS
Cambio's IT team began researching storage management systems that could control the variety of healthcare applications the company offers, and found Tintri.

"We looked into the Gartner Magic Quadrant and saw a name that we hadn't noticed before - Tintri - and decided to check them out," said Adolfsson. "We compared Tintri's VMstore demo with our current storage systems and asked ourselves, 'Is this the way storage is supposed to work?'. We were initially worried that the product was too good to be true, but were happy to actually be able to clone VMs in seconds instead of hours."

Adolfsson and his team replaced their Dell Equallogic systems with Tintri VMstore T850 systems: "We were surprised to see a product that solved most of our technical issues in a very simple way. VMstore is fantastically simple to setup and quick to put into production, which can actually be executed by one person as opposed to a whole team."

Because the Cambio IT team experienced such great success, superior performance and easy management with the initial implementation, they began to explore other opportunities to leverage Tintri to increase disk space for one of its R&D departments. "In our Sweden region, the R&D department requested block storage. So, we went back to Dell EMC again to purchase its new, software-defined, all-flash systems," mentioned Adolfsson. "After a couple years of using the systems, performance diminished and we realised block storage was not what we needed. Looking at our seven-year-old T850 hybrid systems, we found that they were outperforming the Dell EMC ones. We went back to Tintri and found its VMstore to be a better fit, where we initially purchased the EC6000 series followed by two units of the newer VMstore T7040 units a year later as our requirements expanded. We got rid of our Dell systems, and will probably never go back."

Tintri's new VMstore T7000 Series delivers NVMe driven performance and efficiencies, supporting up to 7,500 virtualised applications in just two rack units. At the core of the series is the unique VMstore file system that is built specifically for virtualised and cloud workloads. This enables users to control each application automatically and helps with matching capacity to business needs one drive at a time. Users can consolidate their virtualised enterprise applications onto a scalable, performant and easy-to-use intelligent infrastructure.

NO COMPETITION
Cambio evaluated products from NetApp, Nimble and other Dell EMC solutions, but found the products were not intuitive enough to manage, as well as 'over promising and under delivering' on features and performance. Cambio also felt that the storage solutions evaluated seemed to be built on obsolete architecture and integrated add-ons and patches to increase functionality to an otherwise 'stale' product.

Additionally, many functions were license-based so it was unclear which components were included, and which required additional budget. This made it difficult for Cambio to forecast IT spend in the coming years, knowing the company would continue to grow.

In contrast, Tintri's T7000 platform offered a full suite of management, analytics and software tools that supported the major hypervisors and databases. The fact that Tintri is able to scale up to 645TB with a single VMstore T7000 system and grow beyond 40PB in a scale-out configuration helps forecast IT spending, future proofing the storage environment.

With the implementation of Tintri VMstore solutions, Cambio was able to consolidate its three data centres into one, lowering its operating expenses with the reduced physical footprint. In addition, with Tintri, Cambio manages a comprehensive storage system with one easy-to-use interface to cover all 18 regional sites in Sweden, streamlining productivity and increasing efficiency within the IT organisation.

"The biggest benefit for us was the simplicity of installation," concluded Adolfsson. "Even the management of our daily operations, such as cloning virtual machines, went from hours every day to minutes."

More info: www.tintri.com/vmstore