Broadlane Virtualizes Production Environment for a Real Leap Forward in Flexibility

Acute-care hospitals, ambulatory care facilities, physician practices, and other healthcare providers source millions of supply items, capital equipment purchases, information services—even contract and temporary employees—as they go about the business of delivering high-quality patient care. To keep a tight rein on costs and maximize supplychain efficiency, many leading healthcare providers rely on Broadlane to help them. Founded in 1999, Broadlane has become a leading supply-chain services provider for the healthcare industry, helping its customers optimize purchasing for everything from capital equipment, supplies, pharmaceuticals, procurement services, clinical preference items,
contracting, labor and information services.

The company’s BroadLink™ business-to-business platform supports mission-critical applications for its numerous lines of business, including an e-commerce exchange which transacts billions of dollars in purchases each year, along with approximately 30 applications. Until recently, these applications ran on an infrastructure that resided with a large datacenter services provider.

Complexity without Visibility

Each Broadlane application requires its own set of application, database, and Web servers, and at the previous services provider’s facility, this infrastructure occupied 110 servers. The service provider managed power, network connectivity, and operating systems for the servers, while Broadlane’s internal IT team managed the applications.

“Our costs had increased rapidly for basic IT services,” said Michael Howell, senior vice president of technology for Broadlane. “At the same time, we supported our increasingly complex array of applications with little visibility into those systems. Without a physical architecture document, at times we had to make assumptions about how systems were connected and their interdependencies. If issues arose, it was difficult to identify the impact of the systems on an application, which could sometimes complicate troubleshooting and problem resolution.”

Deploying new equipment or application updates was also time-consuming. Broadlane develops its own applications, and moving them from the test and development laboratory to the production environment was arduous and timeconsuming. Broadlane also needed short lead times for submitting requests and notices.

A Virtual Plan

“We had virtualized quite a bit of our test and development environments, and we wanted to extend the benefits of virtualization to our production environment,” said Howell. “At the same time, we wanted a great deal more flexibility and insight into our infrastructure.”

In addition to basic uptime and performance requirements, Broadlane wanted a provider that could offer better support, better tools and notification capabilities, and serve as its front line of defense for troubleshooting, which would free its internal team for other projects.

“By going to a virtual environment, we also reduced our risk of a large physical move when switching datacenters,” added Howell. “We were able to install state–of-the-art hardware for the new Terremark environment at a fraction of the previous cost and migrate servers over the network using VMware utilities. This enabled us to bring up our new environment in an orderly manner since the original equipment was there for us to fall back on.”

Broadlane conducted an extensive RFP process, looking for a service provider with solid experience in virtualized environments. Terremark had what they were looking for. After a lengthy due diligence process, Broadlane chose Terremark to manage its business-critical back-office applications and infrastructure.

A Flexible Dedicated Solution

Broadlane moved its core IT infrastructure to Terremark’s Infinistructure™ managed utility computing platform. Infinistructure provides on-demand scalability with breakthrough secure virtualization technology for Broadlane’s customer applications, as well as its back-office systems. Infinistructure virtual servers can be moved across physical devices in real time and with no interruption to the application, enabling Broadlane to quickly move new applications from test and development to production. New servers can be provisioned within a day, and Infinistructure’s TomorrowProof™ architecture ensures that the company’s applications always run on the best available platform.

Broadlane also appreciates Terremark’s support model. Unlike the previous service provider that only offered machine and network uptime Service Level Agreements, (SLAs), Broadlane gained application uptime SLAs with the Terremark Highly Managed Hosting™ service. Terremark provides application-level monitoring, return-to-service and troubleshooting services, freeing Broadlane’s team to focus on other initiatives. Software development cycles are shortened, and Broadlane’s internal teams have more time to pursue other IT objectives.

“The Terremark digitalOps® service management platform was revolutionary for us,” said Howell. “It immediately solved a lot of our visibility problems. We can set up alerts, monitor performance utilization and memory CPU, generate statistics, access the Knowledgebase, and take advantage of a ticketing system tied into hardware assets — whether they are virtual or physical.” Broadlane’s team has real-time visibility into the exact same data and views that the Terremark engineers see, giving the company unmatched visibility.

“It was a risk to move from 110 physical servers to 23 at Terremark,” said Howell. “However, virtualization is real, and we put our entire datacenter into it. The transition caused no problems, and the effort was a huge success.”

A Virtual Strategy with Real Savings

By moving to a virtualized datacenter based on Terremark Infinistructure, Broadlane reduced its per-server costs by more than half— approximately 20 percent of its IT budget. In addition with the new support levels, the Broadlane team is now focusing on new projects, such as data archiving and replication strategies.

Terremark’s responsiveness has enabled Broadlane to gain the flexibility that it needed. For example, when the support team had to deploy a new server recently, they simply opened a service ticket. In less than a day, and following Broadlane’s established change management policy, a new server was online.

“Strategically, we were looking for a partner that could provide Broadlane with a combination of best-in-class service, flexibility, and shared accountability as our company grows,” said Jeff Nelson, Broadlane’s chief information officer. “We look forward to a strong partnership with Terremark in the coming years.”

Next Steps

Broadlane plans to connect more of its internal test and development environment to the Infinistructure-based production environment. With more virtual machines, it becomes much easier to move files into production at Terremark, which is expected to streamline Broadlane’s internal software development cycles. At Broadlane, what began as a virtual leap of faith became a real leap forward in productivity and IT management effectiveness.