Case Study: Cardinal Innovations Healthcare achieves simplified infrastructure management and eliminates VMware licensing fees with Nutanix

Cardinal Innovations Healthcare Standardizes on Nutanix for All Workloads and Use Cases

Cardinal Innovations Healthcare, a large specialty health plan serving 875,000 North Carolinians, was weighed down by a complex “three‑tier” data center made up of multiple vendors (Cisco, EMC, VMware, etc.), which made scaling, upgrades and contract management time‑consuming. After a merger that required fast provisioning for 215 new users, the IT team sought a simpler, faster way to deliver secure desktops and reduce operational overhead — opting to use Chromebooks connecting to Citrix VDI to speed onboarding.

Cardinal deployed 21 Nutanix nodes (hybrid and all‑flash) and adopted the built‑in AHV hypervisor for VDI, consolidating MS SQL, Citrix XenDesktop, SharePoint, Exchange and other workloads onto a single platform. Results included elimination of $50–60K/year in VMware licensing for VDI, roughly $100 savings per desktop, dramatically faster installs (<30 minutes), one‑click upgrades that cut upgrade cycles from months to a day, and a fivefold reduction in management effort through centralized administration.

Cardinal Innovations Healthcare

Robert Edwards

Director of Technical Infrastructure