Arcadia is a guardian of healthcare data, managing records for more than 170 million patients across their databases. Their customers include many prestigious healthcare organizations, including provider and payer groups
When they needed a more efficient way to handle its Amazon Web Services (AWS) instances and manage costs, Arcadia turned to Eco from Spot by NetApp to improve cost-efficiency, provide dynamic coverage, and save time.

The Challenge

Arcadia’s clients can send multiple requests at different frequencies, which means their use of EC2, Fargate, Lambda, ECS and reserved instances is exceptionally dynamic. The timing of the requests can be unpredictable, so Arcadia can go from 500 EC2 instances to 1,000 or more in seconds.

With the volume and the spin-up/spin-down activity necessary to accommodate clients, managing the AWS EC2 environment efficiently is crucial to adhere to FinOps principles and avoid wasting money. When not continuously managed, the inefficient use of computer resources can lead to unexpectedly high cloud bills.

The Solution

After looking at different solutions Arcadia chose Eco from Spot by NetApp to automate and optimize its AWS infrastructure. Spot passed the company’s security audit for HIPAA and HITRUST. The implementation itself was simple and painless.

Arcadia fully ramped up in a 90-day period and saw immediate results within the first month.

The Results

Arcadia points to several changes that Spot made to save time, reduce costs, and provide the dynamic coverage it needed — all backed by excellent customer service.

Robust Cost Optimization

Arcadia says the number one benefit of choosing Eco is the money it saves. Because of the volume of instances being deployed, this adds up to significant savings. Using reserved instances, the company reports a savings increase of 35% in three months.

Spot by NetApp offers a suite of products to enhance your FinOps practice by automating and optimizing your cloud resources:

  • Deploying predictive analytics to understand and forecast needs.
  • Continuous identification of the optimal blend of commitment purchases.
  • Automation of the acquisition and utilization of commitment options.

This process simplifies reserved capacity planning and maximizes savings and ROI.

Dynamic Coverage

Even with the company’s large-scale, dynamic environment, Eco allows Arcadia to have 90%+ of On-Demand usage covered by Reserved Instances & Savings Plans to meet surges in demand — something the company didn’t think was possible. Leveraging the AWS reserved instance marketplace and Spot’s intelligent automation, they can buy, sell, and trade instances on the marketplace to maximize capacity and cost-efficiency.

This means they don’t get over committed with reservations they don’t need or rely too heavily on costly On-Demand usage.

Significant Time Savings

Because this process happens automatically, it allows Arcadia to manage reservations at a high level while minimizing manual activity. The company estimates they cut their cost by 90%

Excellent Customer Support

Arcadia also says Spot’s customer service is a significant factor in its success. With the high volume of cloud data processing, time delays can add significant costs. Getting prompt responses to customer support requests also leads to substantial savings.

Arcadia credits Spot with prompt replies to requests, often in an hour or less. Reservations can be adjusted instantly and Spot monitors activity to ensure compute resources are fully optimized. The Spot team notices reservation changes more quickly, notifying Arcadia of changes in coverage or utilization to make the necessary changes for efficiency.

What Can Spot Do for You?

Eco provides workloads with the cloud infrastructure they need to ensure performance and availability while continuously providing the ideal mix of purchasing models, instances, and locations.

Ensure Performance and Availability

No matter how big or small your workload is, you can avoid service disruptions using a blend of spot, reserved, and on-demand instances. AI and ML predict potential interruptions and auto-replace instances for seamless and dynamic workloads.

Continuous Optimization

Whether you use AWS or another cloud service provider, Spot ensures you get the resources you need without having to over-provision and waste resources. Your infrastructure is auto scaled in the most efficient way possible as demand changes.

Reduced Cloud Costs

Spot automates your cloud infrastructure to optimize your spending without having to change or rearchitect applications.

A Comprehensive Suite of Products

Spot by NetApp offers a suite of products to automate and optimize your cloud resources:

  • Elastigroup offers reliable consumption of spot instances and preemptible VMs for stateful and stateless applications.
  • Ocean provides hands-free infrastructure management and is cost-optimized for containerized applications.
  • Eco handles full lifecycle management to optimize reserve capacity planning, purchase, and portfolio maintenance.
  • Cloud Analyzer is a central platform for visibility into your cloud spend and one-click optimization across multiple deployments.

Schedule a demo and cost analysis with a solution architect today to learn more about how Spot can optimize and automate your cloud infrastructure.

Arcadia is a guardian of healthcare data, managing records for more than 170 million patients across their databases. Their customers include many prestigious healthcare organizations, including provider and payer groups
When they needed a more efficient way to handle its Amazon Web Services (AWS) instances and manage costs, Arcadia turned to Eco from Spot by NetApp to improve cost-efficiency, provide dynamic coverage, and save time.