Electronic Health Records (EHRs) makes software for midsize and large medical groups, hospitals, and integrated healthcare organizations. Customers also include community hospitals, academic facilities, children's organizations, safety net providers, and multi-hospital systems. EHR-integrated software spans clinical, access, and revenue functions and extends into the home.

Healthcare provider organizations remain under pressure to maximize the benefits of their substantial investments in industry-leading EHRs. When customers design their data centers for EHR solutions and mission-critical applications, they often identify the following goals for their data center architecture:

FlexPod is EHR validated and supports a platform containing Cisco Cisco UCS with Intel Xeon processors, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and virtualization with VMware ESXi. This platform, coupled with EHR’s High Comfort Level ranking for NetApp storage running ONTAP, gives customers the confidence to run their healthcare applications in a fully managed private cloud through FlexPod that can also be connected to any of the public cloud providers.

BlueXP (formerly NetApp Cloud Manager) is an enterprise-class, SaaS-based management platform that enables IT experts and cloud architects to centrally manage their hybrid multi-cloud infrastructure using NetApp cloud solutions. It provides a centralized system for viewing and managing your on-premises and cloud storage, supporting hybrid, multiple cloud providers and accounts. For more information, see BlueXP.

A Connector instance enables BlueXP to manage resources and processes within a public cloud environment. Connector is required for many of the features provided by BlueXP, and it can be deployed in the cloud or in the on-premises network.

Connector is supported in the following locations:

To learn more about Connector, see the Connector page.

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is a software-defined storage offering that runs ONTAP data management software in the cloud to deliver advanced data management for file and block workloads. With Cloud Volumes ONTAP, you can optimize your cloud storage costs and increase application performance while enhancing data protection, security, and compliance.

Key benefits include the following:

For more detailed information, see Cloud Volumes ONTAP.

NetApp Active IQ Unified Manager allows the monitoring of your ONTAP storage clusters from a single, redesigned, and intuitive interface that delivers intelligence from community wisdom and AI analytics. It provides comprehensive operational, performant, and proactive insights into the storage environment and the virtual machines running on it. When an issue occurs with the storage infrastructure, Unified Manager can notify you about the details of the issue to help identify the root cause. The virtual machine dashboard gives you a view into the performance statistics for the VM so that you can investigate the entire I/O path from the vSphere host down through the network and finally to the storage.

Some events also provide remedial actions that can be taken to rectify the issue. You can configure custom alerts for events so that when issues occur, you are notified through email and SNMP traps. Active IQ Unified Manager allows you to plan for the storage requirements of your users by forecasting capacity and usage trends so that you can act before issues arise, preventing reactive short-term decisions that can lead to additional problems in the long term.

For more information, see Active IQ Unified Manager.

Cisco Intersight is a SaaS platform that delivers intelligent automation, observability, and optimization for traditional and cloud-native applications and infrastructure. The platform helps to drive change with IT teams and delivers an operating model designed for hybrid cloud. Cisco Intersight provides the following benefits:

There are two modes of management operations possible with Cisco Intersight: UCSM Managed Mode (UMM) and Intersight Managed Mode (IMM). You can select the native UCSM Managed Mode (UMM) or Intersight Managed Mode (IMM) for fabric-attached Cisco UCS systems during the initial setup of the fabric Interconnects. In this solution, native IMM is used. The following figure shows the Cisco Intersight Dashboard.

VMware vSphere is a virtualization platform for holistically managing large collections of infrastructure (including CPUs, storage, and networking) as a seamless, versatile, and dynamic operating environment. Unlike traditional operating systems that manage an individual machine, VMware vSphere aggregates the infrastructure of an entire datacenter to create a single powerhouse with resources that can be allocated quickly and dynamically to any application in need.

For more information about VMware vSphere and its components, see VMware vSphere.

VMware vCenter Server provides unified management of all hosts and VMs from a single console and aggregates performance monitoring of clusters, hosts, and VMs. VMware vCenter Server gives administrators a deep insight into the status and configuration of compute clusters, hosts, VMs, storage, the guest OS, and other critical components of a virtual infrastructure. VMware vCenter manages the rich set of features available in a VMware vSphere environment.

For detailed information, see VMware vCenter.

This hybrid cloud solution can be extended to any FlexPod environment that is running supported versions of software, firmware, and hardware as defined in the NetApp Interoperability Matrix Tool, UCS Hardware and Software Compatibility, and VMware Compatibility Guide.

The following table shows the on-premises FlexPod hardware and software revisions.

The following table shows the NetApp BlueXP and Cloud Volumes ONTAP versions.

Next: Installation and configuration.