Installation Guide

2 © 2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. EDCS-1279832
“We’re performing better
and running much more
efficiently in a more
compact data center.
After moving to Cisco
UCS, we eliminated
planned expansions in
power and cooling, saving
us more than $200,000 in
capital expenditures.”
— David Holland
Vice President and CIO
Southern Illinois Healthcare
SIH first decided on application vendors, including MEDITECH for clinical healthcare
applications, a Lawson enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, and NextGen systems
for medical practice automation. After evaluating application requirements and researching
reliable and scalable data center solutions, SIH decided to standardize on a Cisco®
Unified Data Center platform, featuring Cisco Unified Computing System™ (UCS®) blade
servers and Cisco Unified Fabric. “Hospital environments support demanding, complex
applications, so an agile, virtualized data center is essential in providing topnotch patient
care,” says Doug Pratt, consultant technical development at MEDITECH. “The performance
and reliability of data center solutions supporting key applications empower physicians and
administrators to work better and smarter.”
Solution
SIH migrated its data center from primarily HP servers to a virtualized environment built on
Cisco UCS Blade Servers for improved performance, agility, and scalability. The majority
of the servers are Cisco UCS B200 M2 Blade Servers. The 21 enterprise-class servers
balance simplicity with performance and density to host the VMware virtual servers that
run applications from MEDITECH, Lawson, and other critical solution providers.
Cisco B200 M1 Blade Servers host Cisco Unified Communications (UC) to streamline
sharing and collaboration between colleagues at SIH. Two scalable Cisco UCS B440 M2
High-Performance Blade Servers also offer improved virtualization performance to support
NextGen healthcare solutions for SIH physician practices. In addition, four Cisco UCS B230
M3 Blade Servers are virtualized with VMware and dedicated to hosting the virtual desktop
infrastructure (VDI) used by nurses and physicians on the job. By taking advantage of the
broad range of Cisco UCS servers, SIH has the flexibility to deploy the right technology in
the right areas for easy, unified data center management.
Many data center environments require separate connections to each server, but the Cisco
Unified Data Center platform streamlines connections, requiring only one per chassis.
Cisco UCS 6120 Fabric Interconnects offer low-latency network connections and a
single management point for the entire Cisco UCS chassis. Cisco Catalyst® 6500 Series
Switches and Cisco Nexus® 5548 Series Switches provide high-performance networking
connections. The Cisco Nexus 5548 Series Switches, in particular, take advantage of
unified ports that support Ethernet, Fibre Channel, and Fibre Channel over Ethernet to link
the chassis, network, and EMC storage for a reliable, easily managed infrastructure.
The unified environment is key to enabling SIH to take a proactive approach to addressing
the diverse needs of its network users. From a single Cisco UCS Manager console, SIH
can quickly manage both the physical and virtual data center environment. With streamlined
connections, adding new blade servers is as simple as inserting a new blade into the
chassis, with no additional cables needed. Templates simplify management even further,
whether the IT staff is reconfiguring servers or provisioning a new virtual server in minutes.
“Working with Cisco UCS, you can tell that the servers were built with virtualization in
mind,” says Nathan Phoenix, manager of infrastructure systems at SIH. “All components
of the data center, from Cisco to VMware to EMC, work together extremely well. We are
confident that our systems and applications will keep running for healthcare providers
and administrators to provide patients with the best possible care.”