Sydney reseller claims Nutanix world-first

Sydney reseller BEarena has deployed Nutanix boxes for a network of radiology clinics in a world-first implementation of its kind.

Perth Radiological Clinic, which employs 70 radiologists across 19 locations in the Western Australian capital, has had its old storage area networks replaced with a stack of Nutanix hyper-converged devices.

"Over two rounds of purchasing, they have 20 [Nutanix] nodes," said BEarena managing director Darren Ashley. "This is across two data centres."

The main purpose of the storage was to accommodate IntelliRAD - the software the clinic uses for patient data and imaging. The BEarena team worked in conjunction with IntelliRAD staff for the Nutanix integration.

Ashley told CRN that this was the first time that IntelliRAD had been put on hyper-converged technology in Australia: "And I'm not aware of anywhere else globally either - so it was a bit of a first."

The upgrade to hyper-converged has boosted the clinic's capacity for storing past patient data from seven to ten years, according to Nutanix.

BEarena is the reigning two-time Nutanix ANZ partner of the year. However, Ashley said the icing on the cake for his company came with a post-Nutanix upsell of software-defined networking to Perth Radiological Clinic.

"We've implemented Cumulus Networks since then, alongside the Nutanix storage. They've got software-defined networking now as well as software-defined storage," he said.

"It's about speed and agility. They don't have a large IT department. With the Cumulus and Nutanix infrastructure together, they can automate a lot of changes - effectively rollout infrastructure-wide changes with the click of a button."

BEarena had three technical staff working on the Perth Radiological Clinic project plus an account manager. The Nutanix work, including the IntelliRAD integration, took three months - with a further two weeks for deployment. The Cumulus software-defined network was implemented over six weeks in stages, to minimise disruptions.

BEarena placed number 11 on the 2014 CRN Fast50 and has made a name for itself as a pioneer Nutanix partner in Australia - with glamour clients such as Hyundai.