Case Study: Cerner achieves per-client fault isolation, high availability and 20-minute provisioning with F5 Networks' BIG-IP virtual solution

Cerner Uses Virtualized F5 Solution to Ensure Availability of Hospital Health Care Systems

Cerner, a global provider of healthcare IT and managed services for more than 400 hospital systems, needed to replace end-of-sale Cisco ACE load balancers and reduce the blast radius of outages so one client’s failure wouldn’t affect others. To address availability and operational inefficiencies, Cerner selected F5 Networks and its BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager Virtual Edition (BIG-IP LTM VE), leveraging F5’s iRules for customization.

F5 Networks delivered a fully virtualized, multi-tenant deployment—providing each client a high‑availability pair of BIG-IP LTM VEs (over 900 instances in total) running on VMware ESX—with prebuilt templates and iRules to streamline configuration. The result: per-client fault isolation that protects SLAs, a drop in provisioning time to about 20 minutes, easier delegation via role-based access, and improved operational and resource efficiency.

Cerner

Charlie Wehner

Network Engineer