Doctors are generally more concerned about patients than petabytes, which is why Cerner Corp. provides the medical community with health information-technology solutions. The goal is to make the systems experience for health practitioners as seamless as possible by leveraging tools that can spot potential network problems before they impact the user.

“It’s important for an entire domain to be healthy, but what about the 10 doctors that are experiencing frustration right now?” asked Dan Woicke (pictured), senior director of enterprise system management at Cerner. “We’ve switched from just summarizing CPU and memory, all of that high-level stuff, in order to go down to a user level. We want to be able to show who’s experiencing bad performance right now and be able to reach out to them before they call the help desk.”

Woicke spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the virtual Vertica Big Data Conference. They discussed tools to manage major amounts of operational data and solutions for meeting foreign regulatory requirements. (* Disclosure below.)

One billion rows per hour

Woicke and his IT team leverage tools from a number of vendors to provide a seamless user experience, including Vertica, an analytic database management software company and a division of Micro Focus International PLC. The volume of information that Cerner must run through Vertica systems to maintain operational efficiency is significant.

“We have 90,000 agents that we have split across all our clients around the world, and every single hour we’re committing a billion rows to Vertica of operational data,” Woicke said. “I can tell you exactly what’s going on with each of our clinicians.”

In a highly regulated industry such as healthcare, Cerner must also comply with a myriad of laws governing the space. This includes those instances when the company must support clients outside of U.S. borders. A move to cloud coupled with Vertica’s recently updated Eon Mode for scaling cloud infrastructure to meet peak demand are part of the solution.

“We have an initiative to go to Amazon Web Services and provide levels of service to countries like Sweden, which does not want any operational data to leave that country’s walls,” Woicke said. “We have to be able to adapt into Vertica Eon Mode in order to provide the same services in Sweden.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the virtual Vertica Big Data Conference. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Vertica Big Data Conference. Neither Vertica, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE