Modern data centers face increasing demands for agile, high performance service delivery. Digital transformations are driving an increased number of applications with more sources of data, and often times that data is critical proprietary data or in the case of healthcare providers, patient data that must be secured and protected. Enterprises need new IT options that can enable them to quickly respond to the needs of the business.

For healthcare organizations, automating business processes and delivering real-time data insights are a necessity to providing better care. Healthcare IT leaders need to choose tested and proven solutions to protect patient data and meet regulatory and compliance requirements. When it comes to managing patient data and Electronic Healthcare Records (EHR), Epic software is the gold standard.

Implementing and deploying Epic is one of the largest, most mission-critical IT investments made by healthcare organizations, and as a result, Epic has very stringent server and storage infrastructure requirements for running their software, to ensure high availability, high performance and powerful data protections.

Run Epic software on modern, flexible infrastructure
FlexPod, a converged infrastructure platform from Cisco and NetApp, is trusted by over 8700 customers worldwide.

FlexPod is pre-validated and supported by Epic best practices, meeting stringent performance requirements for low-latency and high availability.  Healthcare organizations can leverage FlexPod with Epic EHR to improve patient care by simplifying and accelerating the deployment of critical healthcare applications and protecting patient data.  Learn more about FlexPod with Epic EHR here . And if you are coming to Cisco Live Orlando 2018 (June 10 -14^th), sign up for the sessions below and visit the NetApp booth#2005.

New Standards for the Healthcare Data Center with FlexPod Converged Infrastructure
Tuesday, June 12, 1:30 -2:00 pm. | World of Solutions. Think Tank 2| World of Solutions. Think Tank 2

Healthcare with Epic EHR on FlexPod Converged Infrastructure by Cisco and NetApp
Wednesday, Jun 13, 11:00 a.m. -11:15 a.m. | World of Solutions, Campus Arena| World of Solutions, Campus Arena

FlexPod with Epic EHR is just the first in a series of industry-specific vertical solutions for FlexPod. Stay tuned as we roll out more solutions over the coming year.

Take to the cloud on your own terms
Outside of healthcare, other industry-specific vertical solutions can also have strict requirements around data protection and privacy as well latency-sensitive requirements for certain applications. A few examples include:

• Education: Academic research applications and data
• Government: Disaster response systems and sensitive data
• Energy: Big data and analytics, latency-sensitive applications

For these types of applications and use cases, there's often a need to run workloads locally or keep data on premise for data sovereignty reasons, resulting in a hesitancy to use a public cloud. Business leaders want the elasticity and simplicity of public cloud and the privacy and security of a private cloud at the same time.

Customers can get the best of both worlds with the FlexPod for Managed Private Cloud (MPC) solution, a private cloud built on FlexPod and managed by a certified FlexPod MPC delivery partner.  FlexPod for MPC delivers all the benefits of traditional managed hosting including customization, increased efficiency and faster enablement, then enhances that with the rapid, self-service provisioning, user friendly dashboards and increased agility and scalability of public cloud, all while protecting data sovereignty.  With FlexPod for MPC you can enjoy the operational benefits of the cloud without having to migrate your applications and services.

A platform for innovation
FlexPod is built on Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) servers, Cisco Nexus switches and NetApp storage and is trusted by more than 8700 customers worldwide. It continues to be a platform for innovation with over 160 validated designs to meet customer needs for almost any deployment scenario or delivery model. In addition to the Epic EHR and Managed Private Cloud solutions announced today, over the past several months, FlexPod validated designs have been refreshed for vSphere and Hyper-V  environments, incorporating the latest technologies from Cisco UCS, Cisco ACI and NetApp All Flash FAS storage.  Validated designs for business critical applications like SAP and SAP HANA have also been refreshed.  Other new solutions include desktop virtualization (Citrix XenDesktop/XenApp and VMware Horizon View ) and Microsoft SQL 2106.  Check out some of the FlexPod validated designs here and go to cisco.com/go/flexpod to learn more.

We hope to see you at Cisco Live Orlando the week of June 10^th!

Attend this session and visit NetApp booth#2005 to learn more about FlexPod.
Infrastructure as Code: A Revolutionary Approach to Tackling New Business Imperatives for IT
Wednesday, June 13, 1:00-1:30 pm, World of Solutions, Innovation Showcase

[1] Source: IDC, IDC Worldwide Quarterly Converged Systems Tracker, Q4 2017, April 03, 2018