Virtualization Helped Sentara Save Money, Expand Data Storage

Opting for a virtualization strategy helped Sentara Healthcare save money on hardware and expand its data storage capacity, explained Matthew Douglas, chief enterprise architect at Sentara Healthcare. Sentara Healthcare is a not-for-profit health system serving Virginia and North Carolina, with 300 sites of care, including 12 hospitals.For its virtualization effort, Sentara decided to go with VMware's vSAN product, which is enterprise-class, storage virtualization software. It joins storage devices across a vSphere cluster into a shared data pool, allowing customers to scale up or down as needed. I'm a firm believer that VMware’s vSAN is definitely a lot more scalable because of the size form factor. Right now, we have a multitude of major hospitals with legacy data centers. The ability to size down our hardware footprint has definitely saved us money, and also scalability and speed have been improved,” Douglas told HITInfrastructure.com.