Virtustream Extends Mission-Critical Cloud Tech To Complex Health Care Applications

Mission-critical cloud developer Virtustream, which is a part of Dell EMC, has launched a new public cloud offering specifically targeting health care customers with a full set of managed services for such applications as Epic's electronic medical records software and Meditech's electronic health care records software.

Virtustream this week also unveiled a new integration with VMware vRealize Automation, or VRA, which allows customers with VMware infrastructures to extend their mission-critical applications to the Virtustream Enterprise Cloud.

Together, the two moves represent a significant expansion for Virtustream which until now has been primarily focused on providing a cloud for more common mission-critical workloads such as SAP, said Scott Millard, vice president of global channels and alliances for the Bethesda, Md.-based cloud provider.

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"We're expanding our footprint into new verticals outside SAP," Millard told CRN. "It's our official coming out party."

The expansion of the Virtustream Enterprise Cloud capabilities was good news to Michael Tanenhaus, principal at Mavenspire, an Annapolis, Md. solution provider and Dell EMC channel partner.

"There are very few cloud providers who are willing to sign SLAs around mission-critical applications," he said. "And applications like Epic and Meditech are not known for their ease of being able to virtualize or keep stable at load."

Such a capability makes sense for Virtustream, as bringing health care to the cloud is big business, Tanenhaus said.

"Just in my region alone there are four providers who do cloud services around that business," he said. "But I can't say any of them do Epic, which is probably the most painful of those apps to have working in that sense."

The new Virtustream Healthcare Cloud provides the ability to offer services and infrastructure availability with a HIPAA/HITECH-compliant environment and service level agreements (SLAs) of up to 99.999 percent, Millard said.

The new services can onboarding in public cloud environments along with associated on-premises and off-premises managed services, Millard said.

"We're bringing the same level of capabilities we do in the SAP world to the health care space," he said. "These are legacy, highly-complex EMR applications that customers need to bring to the cloud with a full suite of managed services."

Such applications are I/O-intense and memory-intense, making them not suitable for commodity, public clouds, Millard said.

"But we're focused on shifting such apps to the cloud," he said. "We're working with our on-boarding team to migrate the apps so that customers won't have to re-write the apps."

The second new Virtustream offering, the Virtustream Enterprise Cloud Connector for VMware vRealize Automation, lets customers who are running VMware infrastructure extend mission critical applications and workloads to the Virtustream Enterprise Cloud, Millard said.

"This makes Virtustream an endpoint to VMware VRA," he said. "This lets all VMware customers with VRA virtualized environments connect to the Virtustream cloud, and to use its cloud resources via the VRA.

The Virtustream Healthcare Cloud is slated to be available in June, Millard said. Availability for the Virtustream Enterprise Cloud Connector for VMware vRealize Automation has yet to be determined, he said.