PharmMD Solves Key Healthcare Challenge with Opscode

SEATTLE, Sept. 24, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Opscode^®, the leader in cloud infrastructure automation, today announced that PharmMD, a pioneer in Medication Care Management (MCM) with millions of customers worldwide, has deployed Opscode Hosted Chef™ to automate its Amazon EC2 cloud infrastructure, including configuration and environment management.

PharmMD's sophisticated technology platform provides physicians and pharmacists with an accurate snapshot of each patient's health status, guidelines for best practices and evidence-based medicine protocols. With millions of patients depending on PharmMD, the health IT pioneer must ensure its service is not only always available, but able to handle unexpected surges in use. To do so, the company leverages Amazon EC2 for its compute infrastructure, providing PharmMD with the flexibility and scalability necessary for its popular service.

"Our goal is to improve patients' lives with information. To do that, we must be able to provide that information at all times," said Jamie van Dyke, Senior Infrastructure Architect, PharmMD. "To ensure our system is immediately accessible around the clock, our supporting infrastructure has to be, too. Hosted Chef makes sure it is, so now we have more time to keep innovating."

"PharmMD is solving a key healthcare challenge by leveraging IT to put critical data in the hands of patients and the healthcare system that supports them," said Adam Jacob, Chief Customer Officer, Opscode. "By using Hosted Chef to ensure maximum resource consistency and efficient change control, PharmMD is setting best practices for infrastructure management wherever reliability is at a premium."

Using Hosted Chef, PharmMD's IT operations team has been able to ensure maximum consistency throughout the testing, staging and production of PharmMD's unique medication management application, while reducing resource management from days to minutes.

Customer Benefits:

• Maximum Consistency: With Hosted Chef, PharmMD's IT operations team has a model for reuse, enabling them to write code once and deploy many times over, ensuring resources are always configured to exact and repeatable specifications, while eliminating the risk of potential human error.
• Reduced Management Time: Using Hosted Chef, PharmMD moved its entire infrastructure from a managed services provider to Amazon EC2 in just over two months – a project originally estimated to take at least six months. Additionally, PharmMD can now spin up or spin down entire environments in 15 minutes, a process that took a day or more prior to Hosted Chef.
• Improved Testing: Hosted Chef enables PharmMD's IT operations team to test new code and applications in isolation, then automate the migration of these changes through each environment, ensuring full resource control and highly reliable testing.

With its business based on the ability to reliably deliver confidential information, PharmMD needed an automation engine capable of providing granular reporting and documentation on its infrastructure. Having encountered challenges with other automation products in the past, PharmMD's IT operations team deployed Hosted Chef to provide the documentation and reporting critical to maximum infrastructure consistency. With Hosted Chef, PharmMD has access to a historical record of all changes within its Amazon EC2 resources, improving the efficiency of its change control processes with significantly less manual management.

About Opscode
Opscode is the leader in cloud infrastructure automation. Opscode helps companies of all sizes develop fully automated server infrastructures that scale easily and predictably; can be quickly rebuilt in any environment; and save developers and systems engineers time and money. Opscode's team is comprised of web infrastructure experts responsible for building and operating some of the world's largest websites and cloud computing platforms. More information can be found at www.opscode.com.

Press Contact:
Lucas Welch
[email protected]
206-745-0000

SOURCE Opscode