CareCore National

CASE STUDY
IN BRIEF
Industry
»» Health Care
Challenges
»» Move to a fully-virtualized environment
while ensuring the accessibility of its
web offerings
Solution
»» Deploy Riverbed Stingray virtual
application delivery controller (vADC)
Benefits
»» Significant cost savings by deploying
virtual ADC
»» Internal operations are constantly
accessible, even during periods of
high web traffic
CareCore National
Riverbed virtual application delivery controller brings new life to
CareCore National
When CareCore National, a benefits management company focused on healthcare treatments,
experienced hyper-growth, the company decided it was time to migrate to a virtual environment.
Having grown 500 percent since 2006, CareCore urgently needed a technology partner that would
enable it to move to a fully-virtualized environment, while ensuring the accessibility of its web
offerings. After a comprehensive search, the virtual application delivery controller (vADC) from
Riverbed Technology proved to be the only solution that could fully support and scale with CareCore.
CareCore National looks to Riverbed to fulfill its healthcare mission
CareCore National manages a dynamic network of information that 70 million lives depend on. In
addition, the company’s web-based applications must also be constantly accessible by employees,
including its 1,000 call center agents. The company’s website also hosts a number of portals that
operate as joint platforms with industry partners, making the site a strategic piece of CareCore
National’s overall value proposition.
“These web portals are crucial to our positioning and allows us to undertake industry-centric
ventures and apply evidence-based medicine on a broader scale,” says William Moore,
Executive VP and CTO, CareCore.
When we started our search for
an advanced load balancing and
traffic management solution,
we wanted to avoid investing in
hardware appliances. We had
made such a concerted effort
to eliminate hardware from our
infrastructure and move to a
fully-virtualized environment.”
“When we started our search for an advanced
load balancing and traffic management
solution, we wanted to avoid investing in
hardware appliances. We had made such a
concerted effort to eliminate hardware
from our infrastructure and move to a fullyvirtualized environment. We definitely didn’t
want traditional appliances to pull us backward
to a hardware-based environment.” Even though CareCore National had the
forward-thinking vision to fully transition to
the cloud, it operated with an extremely oldfashioned IT platform before taking this leap.
“We had physical servers, similar to pizza boxes, stacked up like cardboard,” recalls Moore. “Our
application balancing was every bit as traditional as its infrastructure.”
However, as an IT-centric healthcare company that releases software every week, CareCore National
required a virtual, native application suite that could address its load balancing needs and have the
flexibility to work in several different scenarios. After considering many options, CareCore National
learned that only Riverbed could offer the full range of solutions to support its plans to go virtual.
CASE STUDY: CareCore
Riverbed virtual application delivery controller comes with full service
About Riverbed
When CareCore National discovered the Riverbed® vADC solution, the company was immediately
impressed by its versatility to operate inside a cloud environment and far-reaching capabilities for
optimizing performance. The Riverbed vADC is part of the vendor’s Stingray™ product line.
Riverbed delivers performance for the
globally connected enterprise. With
Riverbed, enterprises can successfully and
intelligently implement strategic initiatives
such as virtualization, consolidation, cloud
computing, and disaster recovery without
fear of compromising performance. By giving
enterprises the platform they need to
understand, optimize and consolidate their
IT, Riverbed helps enterprises to build a fast,
fluid and dynamic IT architecture that aligns
with the business needs of the organization.
Additional information about Riverbed
(NASDAQ: RVBD) is available at
www.riverbed.com.
“We originally thought there would be a very large company that could help us address our constant
growth curve appropriately, but we were disappointed in what the big players offered. After doing
a thorough search, Riverbed was clearly the only vendor that could leverage our fully virtual
environment to be optimized 100 percent of the time,” says Moore.
“Not only was Riverbed vADC more superior and capable than competitive offerings, we were also
won over by the company’s unique and attentive approach to customer support.”
“Unlike many of its larger competitors, Riverbed is nimble and very responsive. They provided us with
access to executive leadership and strategic, targeted solutions for our issues,” Moore continued.
Riverbed keeps traffic running, even during spikes
Riverbed vADC is the only solution that could manage CareCore National’s robust growth by
deploying web-based applications across a series of servers. In fact, with the Riverbed solution,
CareCore National was able to move its entire IT infrastructure – from storage to switching – to
a virtualized environment.
CareCore National is running Riverbed
software on a UCS-based ESX environment.
With two co-located sites, the company has
deployed two Riverbed vADCs in each location for high availability and redundancy. As
a result, all of CareCore National’s internal
operations are constantly accessible, even
during periods of high traffic.
After doing a thorough
search, Riverbed was clearly
the only vendor that could
leverage our fully virtual
environment to be optimized
100 percent of the time.
2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2011
“Deploying the Riverbed vADC solution has
been extremely impactful to CareCore and from our investment, we made significant cost savings and increases in revenue” says Moore. “There’s no question that the success of CareCore is
beholden to its web services. Integrating Riverbed has provided us with the reliability and acces
sibility that has been a lifeline to our skyrocketing growth and success.”
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