Delivering better accuracy with shorter processing times
Medacist specializes in drug-diversion analytics, a specialized healthcare service for identifying unusual patterns that could indicate possible abuse. The company’s Genesis healthcare data platform applies data analytics — including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) — to vast amounts of data from a variety of sources throughout a drug’s lifecycle.
Reliable, scalable and high-performing compute and storage solutions are mission-critical for Medacist. When the company needed to integrate multiple storage and analytics systems onto a shared data plane, David J. Brzozowski, Jr., Chief Technology Officer at Medacist, turned to Dell Technologies. By partnering with Dell Technologies for their infrastructure modernization project in support of the Genesis healthcare data platform, Medacist is now able to deliver new insights to more clients, faster than ever before.
The low-latency, high performance private cloud foundation integrates Dell EMC PowerEdge servers and Dell EMC PowerScale storage. The core of the system is a Hadoop cluster residing on Dell EMC PowerEdge R540 and R640 servers running demanding AI workloads including intensive machine learning and statistical algorithms. It also includes Kubernetes and machine learning workloads running on PowerEdge 740 servers with NVIDIA® GPUs. According to David, “Our partnership with Dell Technologies allows us to take advantage of the full breadth and depth of their compute, storage, networking and security solutions. Dell Technologies offers best-of-breed solutions in all these categories.”
The team also uses VMware® vCenter™ and VMware vSphere™ Enterprise Plus to manage virtualized server resources and optimize server performance, along with Dell EMC OpenManage Enterprise and iDRAC. The PowerScale OneFS distributed file system provides management for the storage infrastructure. This combination helps the team easily deploy, monitor and manage system updates and add new technologies. “OpenManage Enterprise offers a complete view of all the servers in our infrastructure,” David explains. “It’s an easy-to-use, centralized management tool that gives us the transparency to detect and address issues as soon as they occur. Through OpenManage Enterprise, we can ensure that our PowerEdge infrastructure is at the optimal firmware patch level. We maintain control not just over the operating system security patches, but over server security overall.”
The ease of management also allowed Medacist to onboard more customers with minimal headcount increase. As David reports, “As we grew from 600 to over 2,000 clients, we were able to minimize growth in management overhead while delivering the scalability and performance our increased workloads required thanks to our Dell Technologies infrastructure.” The complete solution has also reduced data processing lag time from 24 hours to just five minutes. It also provides 99.99% uptime, which has saved Medacist millions of dollars by upholding client service level agreements (SLAs).
