Real Estate
Network Flexibility and Low Touch Provisioning
Ansible
Real Estate
Network Flexibility and Low Touch Provisioning
Ansible
Healthcare Realty is a $3.5B publicly-traded Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) that focuses on owning, managing, acquiring and developing outpatient medical facilities throughout the United States. As the first REIT to specialize in medical office buildings, the Company has built a well-regarded medical real estate portfolio affiliated with market-leading healthcare systems.
Healthcare Realty provides property management services to more than 200 healthcare-related properties in 29 states and owns over 40 staffed locations, making network connectivity critical to their and their customers’ businesses. The majority of the outbound communication is over the network, including email that needs to be up 24x7 and network support that is expected to be up 99.99%.
With multiple branch offices and limited staff to manage all the locations, Healthcare Realty needed their network to be reliable and easy to provision and manage remotely. Their existing legacy networking solution from Cisco was difficult to manage and required expensive 3rd party tools to configure remotely.
It was critical for the team to have a solution that allowed flexibility to leverage their existing configuration management tool (Ansible) and manage sites remotely, all while reducing the cost to acquire and manage all branch sites.
Cumulus Networks [now NVIDIA Cumulus ]had the foresight to know that the world was ready for an open network OS, unlike other well known competitors who are still struggling to catch up. The level of integration with third party systems is phenomenal because it's just Linux. Follow the Rocket Turtle, take the red pill.
Joshua BowersSenior Systems Engineer at Healthcare Realty Trust Inc.
To gain flexibility and the ability to remotely configure and manage the network at each branch site, Healthcare Realty decided to standardize their stack by introducing a Linux network OS. The team settled on NVIDIAⓇ Cumulus Linux due to the flexibility it delivered. With a Linux network OS, the team was able to leverage their existing tools and knowledge across the stack, resulting in lower OpEx and streamlined operations. NVIDIA Cumulus Linux running on open commodity hardware and optics also helped to lower CapEx.
The main criteria for selecting NVIDIA Cumulus Linux included:
The biggest benefit the Healthcare Realty team received by adopting NVIDIA Cumulus Linux was time management. The ability to leverage existing applications to manage the network at all remote sites while reducing the OpEx helped the team build an effective operational model that was flexible and scalable.