Protecting vital healthcare services

Founded in 1984 and headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, Centene Corporation is a leading US healthcare enterprise that offers affordable and high-quality products to more than 27.9 million members.

Committed to helping people live healthier lives, Centene Corporation serves more than one in 15 individuals across the US. Through access to high-quality healthcare, innovative programs, and health solutions, the company helps families and individuals get well, stay well, and be well.

Centene’s digital core plays a vital role in supporting its 27.9 million members. In total, the company runs mission-critical applications and databases on more than 15,000 virtual machines (VMs) across five data centers. With such a large digital landscape, ensuring high availability and rapid business continuity is a top priority.

Adam Kantor, Senior Infrastructure Domain Architect at Centene, says: “When it comes to data resilience, we do everything we can to ensure that we can recover our key systems, wherever the data sits. For Centene, even short periods of downtime carry a big cost. So, the goal isn’t just to ensure that our data and systems are protected; it’s also to ensure that we can recover them quickly if we need to.”

For many years, Centene has relied on Veeam to help it achieve data resilience across its IT estate. Over time, the company recognized that its legacy disk arrays were creating a recovery bottleneck.

“If we can’t recover quickly enough, then our backups are of little use,” Kantor continues. “To get the level of performance we wanted, we decided to look for an all-flash storage solution.”

At the same time, Centene was preparing for a major IT refresh. By moving from on-premises data centers into colocation facilities, the organization aimed to unlock economies of scale and meet new board-level environmental, social, and governance (ESG) objectives.

“We had the opportunity to reimagine how a modern data center should look,” says Kantor. “From a storage perspective, we targeted a solution that would deliver on our performance requirements while reducing both rack space and power consumption at our new colocation sites.”

To transform its approach to data resilience, Centene selected Everpure FlashArray solutions to deliver high performance, reliability, and availability for its mission-critical systems. The combination of Veeam Data Platform and Everpure allows the company to create indelible snapshots and perform large-scale, concurrent system restores faster than ever.

“We ran a head-to-head comparison between Everpure and solutions from other companies, including the incumbent vendor,” says Kantor. “Everpure outperformed everyone in all the areas that mattered most to us. As well as offering an all-flash solution with tight Veeam integration, Everpure gave us that high performance in a very compact, cost-effective, and energy-efficient footprint. Dollar for dollar, Everpure offered so much more than the other vendors we evaluated.”

With Evergreen//Forever™, Centene has the peace of mind that comes with nondisruptive upgrades and expansion.

“With our previous solution, we almost always needed downtime whenever we performed updates,” says Kantor. “With Everpure, it’s the opposite. Because our FlashArrays are equipped with dual controllers as standard, we can perform maintenance without the complexity of negotiating downtime windows with the business. And when the time comes to scale out our environment, we’re sure that Evergreen//Forever will make the process seamless.”

Centene deployed its first FlashArray systems at the same time it started building its new colocation facility in Columbus, Ohio. Based on the outstanding performance of the Everpure Platform, the company decided to adopt FlashArray as the storage solution for all of its new colocation sites.

“Because unplanned downtime is just not an option for Centene, we challenged the Everpure team to give us much more redundancy than a typical deployment,” recalls Kantor. “The Everpure team came through for us. Our redundant configuration means even if we lose an entire array, our production systems won’t miss a beat.”

To date, Centene has deployed eight FlashArray systems across two colocation sites. Over the next 12 months, the company will complete its data center transformation project by deploying a further five FlashArray systems in one additional colocation facility.

“If you’re not using Veeam with an all-flash solution like Everpure FlashArray, you’re doing yourself a disservice,” comments Kantor. “In the long run, all our Veeam-centric workloads will move over to the Everpure Platform. FlashArray also offers support for our handful of non-Veeam backups, including systems running on IBM AIX.”

By locking down its FlashArray systems with Everpure SafeMode, Centene helps ensure that its snapshots are protected against cyber threats such as ransomware. SafeMode Snapshots are indelible, so even if admin credentials are compromised, critical data cannot be deleted. To optimize costs, the company regularly offloads snapshots from the Everpure Platform to an S3 storage target.

“We use the Everpure Platform to handle snapshots and high availability, and at the application level, Veeam has full awareness of the immutability of our S3 buckets,” explains Kantor. “By using Veeam in direct SAN mode rather than network mode, we can also take full advantage of the performance of the Everpure Platform.”

Operating in an industry where IT outages can cost millions of dollars a day, Centene must be able to recover rapidly in the event of an incident or cyberattack. With Everpure and Veeam, the company has achieved exactly that.

“In testing, we’ve spun up around 30 VMs simultaneously, including some 300GB machines, in less than 20 minutes,” says Kantor. “In our previous environment, there’s no way that would have been possible. The combination of Everpure and Veeam has shortened our recovery time objective by more than 99%, which helps us to ensure Centene’s digital core is online around the clock.”

Crucially, the Everpure Platform aligns perfectly with Centene’s ESG initiatives. With an average data reduction ratio of 3:1 and a compact data center footprint, FlashArray solutions offer substantial power, cooling, and rack space savings.

“My data center team loves putting in Everpure because they get to replace entire racks of legacy equipment with comparatively tiny FlashArray solutions,” says Kantor. “We’re measuring energy savings of around 70% compared to our previous spinning disk arrays and reducing our data center footprint by around 90%. When I first ran the numbers, I was staggered at the difference Everpure has made to our environment.”

As it moves into the next phase of data center transformation, Centene sees Everpure as a strategic, long-term partner.

“When we choose a vendor, we don’t just want a commercial transaction; we want a trusted partnership with a company that’s truly invested in our success,” concludes Kantor. “If we’re not challenging ourselves to do things faster and better, then we’re not doing our jobs properly. We greatly value our regular meetings with the Everpure team to discuss emerging technology trends and explore new ways to enhance our platform and our capabilities.”