NightHawk ain't large, but nonetheless needs to consolidate, virtualize
Cisco has over 900 paying customers for its Unified Computing System consolidated data center platform, which seems like a large number when you consider it represents a networking company’s entry into the blade and rack mount server business – and that it’s only been shipping for a year. Customer NightHawk Radiology Services fits the prototypical profile of a UCS target: one looking to consolidate, virtualize and reduce operational complexity.
NightHawk will replace 120 physical IBM and Dell server blades with 18 UCS servers in four chassis running virtualized workloads. Not a giant deployment by any means but nonetheless a business critical one: NightHawk provides 3 million radiology interpretation and consultation studies per year to 1,600 healthcare sites – 26% of all hospitals in the U.S. That’s 9,000 studies and 500 Gigabytes of image data per day, and 120 Terabytes of online data.
The NightHawk project entails consolidating ad hoc server rooms in multiple sites globally to reduce the time it takes to deploy new technology, lower capital and operational expenditures, and simplify management. The environment became too far flung and unwieldy after NightHawk went on a buy-and-deploy binge earlier.
To date, NightHawk says it has cut its cabling and switch port requirements to a fraction of what they were: The UCS installation requires only 20% to 25% as many upstream switch ports to support the same level of performance and connectivity as the 120 server deployment. And server deployments and updates have been reduced to minutes from hours, while expansion costs are 25% to 33% that of alternatives, NightHawk claims.
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