Hospital ship operations demand precise logistics and coordination to function seamlessly as floating medical facilities.

To support this mission, Nutanix Inc. equips the U.S. Navy with a hyperconverged infrastructure platform designed to deliver reliable, secure and scalable IT in mission-critical environments, according to Mike Taylor (pictured), hospital ship joint task director for the United States Department of Defense. 

DOD’s Mike Taylor talks with theCUBE about how Nutanix enhances hospital ship operations.

“Our primary mission is, of course, combat casualty care,” Taylor said. “That’s if we’re at war, we have wounded, marines, sailors, soldiers, airmen, that we come back to the ship where we would treat them. If we’re not doing combat casualty care, another one of our mission sets is humanitarian assistance and disaster response. For instance, both Mercy and Comfort have deployed in support of typhoons in the Philippines or hurricanes in Haiti. We actually have an onboard continuity-of-operations rack. We have two Nutanix clusters that will fall over to each other, so lots of IT going on.”

Taylor spoke with theCUBE’s John Furrier and Bob Laliberte at Nutanix .NEXT, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how the U.S. Navy is optimizing hospital ship operations with the help of Nutanix. (* Disclosure below.)

Nutanix’s role in powering hospital ship operations

By integrating compute, storage, networking and virtualization into a single system, Nutanix helps the U.S. Navy reduce reliance on complex, bulky hardware. This approach helps streamline hospital ship operations, according to Taylor.

“You have shipboard services, but then in addition to that, you also have a full hospital that uses modern devices and medical procedures and everything else,” he said. “Everything from vibration sensors in the engine room to unique surgical suite equipment that we have to make sure we’re providing, which by the way is also wireless. So, we have clinical wireless on the hospital ships. One of the big areas where Nutanix helps us, because the core power plant of our systems has to be, it’s running all the servers, it’s running everything.”

Nutanix Move enables the migration of virtual machines and applications from traditional infrastructure to Nutanix’s hyperconverged infrastructure with minimal downtime. The ability to perform that migration efficiently is critical in dynamic, resource-constrained environments such as naval hospital ships, according to Taylor.

“We had Nutanix support actually come out to the ships … using Nutanix Move, directly taking virtual machines ESXi and moving them over to [Nutanix] AHV,” he said. “It’s a hospital, we have to be online all the time … live migration. Nobody really knew what we were doing, because literally, redundant systems took over, and it was good to go.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Nutanix .NEXT: 

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Nutanix .NEXT. Neither Nutanix Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE