Load balancer hardware for Enterprise Imaging: Refresh now to avoid costly outages

Loadbalancer.org are the market leaders in load balancing mission-critical Enterprise PACs systems. So we know how vital high availability is for delivering critical services.

When hospitals and patients count on their PACS systems, downtime directly affects the patient's quality of care — delaying procedures, treatment, and surgeries.

Why do you need to refresh load balancer hardware?

The healthcare industry holds itself to a high standard, and maintaining reliability for mission-critical applications is at the heart of delivering medical imaging solutions to clinicians and patients. This is why Loadbalancer.org proactively checks the age of the hardware that hospitals use.

Even though we don't have a End of Life for our licenses, hardware does have a limited life-span; PSUs, disk drives and CPUs will eventually fail. So as the appliances age, the risk of hardware failure increases.

By replacing or upgrading your existing hardware, you then 'refresh' your appliances — extending the lifespan of the PACs system and ensuring it remains highly available, scalable, and resilient.

What are the risks of NOT refreshing hardware?

One reason is that DELL provides us with a 3-year hardware warranty for their bare metal, but once this expires you will no longer be covered.

But not refreshing your hardware could also lead to a variety of other issues that may impact your system's performance, reliability, and security.

Performance degradation

• Older hardware may not be able to handle the increased traffic and processing demands of modern applications, leading to slower response times.

Reliability issues

• Older hardware may be more prone to failures, leading to unexpected system outages.

Scalability challenges

• Outdated hardware may not be able to support increased traffic or new applications, hindering your ability to scale and grow.

Higher costs

• Older hardware can require more frequent patching and maintenance, increasing operational costs.

Security vulnerabilities

• Older hardware may lack the required security features and updates necessary to protect against modern cyber threats. This could leave your system vulnerable to attacks such as DDoS, hacking, and data breaches.

Costly PACS system outages

• Ultimately, many of the above scenarios could lead to compromised PACS systems and interrupted patient care.

To mitigate these risks, it is essential to have a regular hardware refresh cycle that aligns with your organization's needs and budget.

When do you need to refresh your load balancer?

Loadbalancer.org will notify its customers well before their appliance is 5-years old and start the conversion with them re next steps. Why you might ask?

We inform our customers before the 5-year mark for three reasons:

1. Firstly, to ensure they're still covered by a support contract to ensure they can migrate for free to virtual if needs be.  
2. Secondly, to allow for time to complete the migration process. We are aware that our users can be busy with ongoing projects and we help them migrate in a time frame that works best for them.
3. The last reason we notify our customers is to ensure they don't have an unexpected cost. We leave plenty of time to budget for the hardware refresh.

A hardware refresh typically involves multiple stakeholders and possibly requires years of planning.

What are your Loadbalancer.org hardware refresh options?

There are two ways you can 'refresh' your hardware with Loadbalancer.org:

1. Migrate from hardware to virtual - Assuming your appliances are still supported, you can migrate your load balancer from hardware to a like-for-like virtual alternative at any time, at no extra cost! Once you purchase our hardware you own the license perpetually, so we happily support our customers with the transition to virtual load balancers. Find out more about free migration as part of our Freedom License. You might also be interested to learn that we offer a zero End-of-Life policy on all our software.
2. Supercharge your hardware - We can also help you upgrade to brand-new hardware at a great price. If this is the route you want to go down, contact our Sales team to see what discounts might be available. We can offer a like-for-like hardware refresh, or you can upgrade to an appliance with a higher throughput.

How do we help our customers through the process?

While our virtual load balancers don't come with an End of Life, our hardware unfortunately does. But we ensure that our customers don't endure any unnecessary pain, and never force them to refresh their hardware.

In order to help healthcare providers keep their PACs systems robust and resilient however, our goal is to notify users, so they understand the risks of older appliances.

When it comes to healthcare IT infrastructure, it is integral that we help our customers with future planning and consider patients' and hospitals' needs.

We do this in a number of different ways, for example:

• We continue to support customers existing appliances until they migrate over to the new appliances.
• We extend Freedom License support contracts to give customers more time to migrate to virtual appliances, if they wish.
• Our consultative approach, means we work with you to understand the nuances of your network and IT ecosystem so we can better advise you on the next best solution.

What about upgrades?

If you choose to upgrade your hardware, then we can of course help you with that too. Many of our customers take advantage of the hardware refresh to upgrade their appliance to one with higher throughput.

Book a meeting to get a quote and for us to answer any questions you may have.

What hardware does Loadbalancer.org currently offer?

Hardware is still used by many of our customers for a number of different reasons.

Our current offering includes:

• Enterprise Prime - 1Gb of connectivity
• Enterprise Flex - 10/25Gb of connectivity
• Enterprise MAX - 100Gb of connectivity

Regardless of where you are on your hardware journey, our sales team are always here to help so for more information, or to have your questions answered, book a meeting.