Episode Details

In a video interview, Five Horizons CTO Benjamin Urquhart explains how hyperconverged infrastructure let a nonprofit healthcare provider scale from zero servers to over 50 virtual machines.

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Video transcript:

Benjamin Urquhart: Nutanix for us was honestly a little bit of an easy call. Organizationally, we had no infrastructure in place as far as server backends, everything like that. Being in the nonprofit sector where we are, we’re a specialty healthcare provider, so we have a lot of grant limitations on how we can spend our resources. Because of that, we can’t really go, let’s go throw them in the cloud, let’s do this, let’s do that. We had to really look at it from a strategical aspect and go, well, what’s my ROI coming back in on this? What type of solutions are we trying to do that’s still going to allow us to be scalable and grow? We’ve opened up four new facilities in the last 18 months between Mississippi and Alabama right now. So being able to have something in house with Nutanix for us was great. It was HCI platform, something I’d never done, but let’s go.

It gives us our hardware, it gives us a hypervisor. It’s different, but let’s give it a shot. Licensing became much more easier or simplified. There we go. Nutanix allowed us to go from really not having an internal infrastructure to running over 53 VMs right now internally from different internal resources, whether they’re part of our research environment or our true day-to-day activity. So it’s been a great marriage from that aspect, I would say, like partnership. It’s allowed us to grow and be scalable, but also secure and understanding where our data is and how it lives within our ecosystem.

Ken Kaplan: From that time that you’ve got things going to the 57 VMs out there, what was that time span and how did things change?

Benjamin Urquhart: So it was a very unique instance actually. I was working for another organization very similar to five Horizons Self-Services and that particular organization was failing. Five Horizons and their board and our CEO, they came in. We had over 3000 clients in our coverage area for that particular organization. They bought all of our assets, everything like that. We retained certain staff members and we didn’t close the doors once in the fall of 2022. So from that angle, it was great because we have this infrastructure here that we had already started building with this company. Now we’re going to Five Horizons because they’ve acquired our assets and being able to keep the doors open for patient care.

It was almost like having where the starting line was on your infrastructure instead of completely starting over again like I had the three years before that. Oh hey guys, we’re halfway there. We have the cores. We’re changing domains. We were changing simplified things. So for us it’s just allowed that ability. The biggest push because we already had it was now we’re at the point where we’re looking at additional blocks and clusters because we continue to expand. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it allows us that ability to keep everything in a manner that we know we can do. We have a very lean team that really have to support not just our Nutanix environment, but our backup environment and everything else on top of it. And Nutanix has really simplified that. I mean they can spin up a new VM now in about 15 minutes from them, which is fantastic. There’s a lot less time and delay because of how HP operates.

Ken Kaplan: Now you’re like a veteran almost with HCI and what have you learned and what do you want to try next?

Benjamin Urquhart: So some of t