Case Study: Group Health Cooperative of South Central Wisconsin achieves out-of-the-park Epic performance and more than 60% IT cost savings with NetApp FlexPod

Group Health Moves Epic Software Suite to Linux/ VMware on NetApp for Out-of-the-Park Performance

Group Health Cooperative of South Central Wisconsin, a nonprofit managed healthcare organization serving 70,000+ members, faced a major IT rearchitecture: migrate its business‑critical Epic EHR from a Windows/RISC environment to a supported UNIX/Linux platform, virtualize production on VMware using Intel x86 servers, and consolidate fragmented storage from multiple vendors—all under tight time and capital constraints.

GHC‑SCW standardized on a FlexPod architecture (NetApp storage, Cisco UCS servers, VMware, and RHEL), migrating 30 TB in under three months. The deployment delivered “out‑of‑the‑park” performance, halved storage administration time, is projected to cut server/storage maintenance costs by more than 60% over two years, reclaimed significant data‑center space (up to 40%), and improved availability and DR through NetApp replication.

Group Health Cooperative of South Central Wisconsin

David Stark

Chief Technology Officer