Data Center

OnePoint Patient Care Taps Hyperconvergence to Boost Reliability and Scalability

The move offered the pharmacy chain greater uptime and all the benefits of a simpler underlying infrastructure.

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A few years ago, OnePoint Patient Care, a national, hospice-focused pharmacy that offers delivery, mail-order and pharmacy benefit management services, was fed up with its 3-2-1 networking solution. The organization, which has 10 pharmacies throughout the country, serves 20,000 patients a day and fills roughly 160,000 prescriptions a month, was nearing end-of-life for its current solution and needed a change that would prepare it for the future.

“We just weren’t getting the efficiency, performance or even the scalability that we needed at that time,” says CIO Jason Polonus. “We knew that we needed a long-term plan for virtualization and that was where we were headed.”

Equally important was the desire for the IT staff to focus its efforts elsewhere.

“Underlying infrastructure should not be a constant worry — it should enable us to do the work we need to do,” says Polonus.

Hyperconvergence Buoys Uptime and Security for OnePoint

In order to obtain the reliability, flexibility and scalability the organization was looking for, it tapped Nutanix’s hyperconvergence solution.

“We had chronic issues with our old system, whether about running out of space for storage, losing a form or something like that,” says Polonus. “We don’t have those issues with the new hyperconverged system, and it saves time and gives us the ability to scale however we need.”

Moreover, it streamlined and unified the underlying IT infrastructure.

“Hyperconvergence can really simplify the IT infrastructure, particularly the storage, networking and computing that all of our healthcare customers frequently use to run their most critical applications in order to modernize their data center environment,” says Nutanix Chief Marketing Officer Ben Gibson.

This provided several advantages for OnePoint, including an easy implementation.

“We were amazed at how quickly we could bring up a hyperconverged environment,” says Polonus. “When you use a 3-2-1 infrastructure there’s so much timing involved, making sure that all the vendor companies are aligned. But with a hyperconverged infrastructure, we literally had it up and running within a day.”

The streamlined infrastructure also means it’s easier to oversee security guidelines.

“Because everything is unified, we can create security standards that allow us to address new cybersecurity concerns,” says Polonus.

Moreover, the system has improved reliability, which means the pharmacy can provide consistent service to its patients and clients.

“Our uptime availability has gone up dramatically. Previously we were around the 92 percent mark, and now we’re closer to 97 or 98 percent,” says Polonus. “It’s so important; any delay or outage means that our patients aren’t getting what they need.”