Reagan Medical Center Deploys Electronic Health Records Management and PACS Imaging Software With Storage Spaces Direct

Company Overview

Reagan Medical Center is a full service medical practice that includes primary and urgent care, wellness visits, occupational medicine and an imaging center. It is a completely paper-free office that utilizes electronic medical records, so patients can visit any of its locations and access their medical records anywhere, anytime. It employs approximately one hundred-fifty employees in six locations in the greater Atlanta area.

IT Challenge: Replace outdated SAN with hyper-converged infrastructure solution to power its on-premise electronic health record (EHR) management and PACS imaging software

Reagan Medical Center had several aging Dell SANs running VMware vSphere 5.0 and its EHR clinical management software, eClinicalWorks, no longer supported Reagan’s older VMware software release and SAN hardware specs. Kylentus Clark, Network Administrator, Reagan Medical Center, and Dr. Satish Poddar, founder and Medical Director, Reagan Medical Center, calculated the costs of switching from an on-premise to cloud subscription-based eClinical Works solution. The two found that it was more affordable to keep an on-premise deployment.

Reagan Medical Center’s goals in updating its infrastructure included:

• Replacing existing VMware platform and SAN with a hyper-converged solution that could support their clinical management and PACS (picture archiving and communications system) imaging software, and improve quality of service (QoS) for its patients and medical professionals
• Increasing performance with all-NVMe flash storage

The Solution: All-NVMe DataON Kepler K2N-108 hyper-converged appliance with Windows Server 2016 Storage Spaces Direct

Watching trends in storage, Clark and Dr. Poddar had thoroughly researched hyper-converged infrastructure. With its promise of lower costs, better performance and affordable all-NVMe flash storage compared to a traditional SAN, the team felt HCI was a superior solution and would best fit their needs. After making the decision, Clark and Dr. Poddar looked at HCI solutions from Microsoft and VMware. “The VMware software costs for HCI were unreasonably high,” Clark said.

“With Windows Server 2016 and Storage Spaces Direct, the costs were much lower and were consolidated in the Windows Server 2016 Datacenter edition. In addition, I was already familiar with Windows Server platforms and its easy-to-use interface, so I was very comfortable with choosing Microsoft.”

Clark came across DataON on the web while researching Storage Spaces Direct and reached out to the DataON sales team. Clark and Dr. Poddar were originally interested in DataON’s S2D series, but DataON assessed Reagan Medical Center’s needs and introduced Clark and Dr. Podar to the DataON Kepler 2-node (K2N) hyper-converged appliance designed for small-to-medium sized businesses and branch office/remote office (ROBO) deployments.

Unlike most Storage Spaces Direct deployments, which are three nodes or more, the K2N appliance’s two nodes are directly connected to each other, eliminating the need for an Ethernet switch. This simplifies deployment and reduces costs, making it perfect for small data centers.

You can look on YouTube for how-to videos, but you need expertise. And I don’t think there is anyone offers DataON’s kind of support.”
Kylentus Clark, Network Administrator, Reagan Medical Center

Clark was impressed by the large number of published DataON customer stories, but he wanted to speak with customers first hand. DataON encouraged him and set up the introductions. Hearing nothing but good things from DataON customers about Storage Spaces Direct and DataON’s hardware quality and customer support, Dr. Poddar and Clark chose DataON as their solution provider.

After designing an initial all-NVMe flash, DataON K2N series Storage Spaces Direct solution, Reagan needed assurance that it would be compatible with its EHR software. DataON contacted and worked with the eClinical Works support team to ensure the software was compatible with Storage Spaces Direct and Reagan’s K2N series hardware configurations.

For Reagan Medical Center, the DataON K2N series was ideal for their complete medical management solution, using it as an FTP server, managing radiology imaging, running their EHR software with eClinical Works, generating reports, and tunneling radiological imaging to an offsite, third-party group of radiologists for review. The K2N solution was configured with terminal servers, enabling Reagan’s staff to remotely login to the applications server using virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

Reagan’s K2N complete medical management solution was configured into thirteen virtual machines (VMs):

• (4) eClinical Works application servers
• (2) MySQL servers for eClinical Works
• (1) MySQL job scheduling for MySQL servers
• (1) EVO HTML to .pdf server to create additional custom reports
• (1) FTP server
• (1) PACS radiological image and machine management
• (1) Tunneling route to the third-party radiology group
• (2) Terminal servers allowing medical professionals to remote into K2N applications via VDI

The Results

When Reagan Medical Center’s K2N hyper-converged appliance arrived, the clusters were pre-configured and ready to go with customized deployment scripts. Clark said, “I called DataON support and they were able to see remotely that the nodes were connected correctly. Within thirty minutes of booting up for the first time, I was up and running. It was that simple. I also needed help creating a VM in the new hyper-converged environment, and DataON showed me how I could use the Cluster Manager to do it and save time, which helped tremendously.”