How can healthcare IT teams modernize legacy infrastructure, meet HIPAA compliance, and migrate from VMware without disrupting clinical operations? With Atmosphere!
Healthcare IT is facing a moment of reckoning. Electronic health records, imaging systems, and AI-powered diagnostics are growing fast, and the infrastructure supporting them needs to catch up.
Many hospitals and health systems still rely on outdated legacy environments that can’t keep up with increasing workloads or new data-sharing requirements. That means rising costs, data silos, and systems that can’t scale.
That’s why healthcare teams are shifting to cloud-first models that balance security, performance, and long-term flexibility. Atmosphere, a fully integrated OpenStack distribution developed by VEXXHOST, is designed specifically to support that shift. It gives healthcare organizations a production-grade, open-source cloud that’s built to handle sensitive workloads, regulatory demands, and the operational complexity of modern care delivery.
Open Infrastructure That Fits the Real World
Healthcare infrastructure must meet demanding requirements. Atmosphere provides a flexible, scalable solution tailored to these needs.
Atmosphere integrates key OpenStack components, including Nova for compute, Cinder for storage, Neutron for networking, Kubernetes for orchestration, and Ceph for scalable, resilient storage. Whether supporting high-IOPS electronic health record (EHR) systems, compute-intensive AI workloads requiring GPU acceleration, or distributed applications, Atmosphere offers the robust foundation healthcare organizations need.
For organizations navigating compliance standards such as HIPAA or GDPR, Atmosphere includes essential features like encryption at rest and in transit, federated identity with Keycloak, and role-based access controls (RBAC) to help align infrastructure with regulatory expectations.
Going from Legacy to Modern Infra
For many healthcare organizations, modernization is about navigating from where they are today, whether that’s an older OpenStack deployment or an expensive VMware-based environment. Both paths come with real risks - downtime that affects care delivery, compatibility issues with EHRs and PACS systems, and the challenge of meeting regulatory requirements mid-transition.
The migration journey looks different depending on where you’re starting.
If you're already on OpenStack but struggling with upgrades, Atmosphere helps you move to the latest version cleanly. You don’t need to rebuild your stack or manage a painful replatforming process. Because Atmosphere is a fully integrated OpenStack distribution, adopting it means stepping into a curated, production-grade deployment of the latest OpenStack version without starting over. And because VEXXHOST is an active member of the OpenInfra community, we stay ahead of the curve. Our engineering team gets early access to security patches, project roadmaps, and upgrade paths, meaning your infrastructure evolves without disruption.
For healthcare teams moving off VMware, the path is different but just as manageable. VEXXHOST offers Migratekit, an open-source CLI tool purpose-built for near-zero-downtime migration of virtual machines from VMware to OpenStack.
Migratekit operates in two phases:
- In the migration phase, it performs one or more sync cycles to copy data from VMware into OpenStack while the source VMs remain running. Initial syncs copy everything; subsequent runs copy only changes.
- When ready, the cutover phase powers down the VMware instance, does a final sync, and spins up an identical VM on OpenStack using the transferred volumes.
This is crucial in clinical environments where system availability is non-negotiable.
Unlike manual exports or brittle scripts, Migratekit supports incremental syncing, tracks block-level changes between cycles, and provisions the target environment (including network mappings and security policies) to mirror your original setup. It’s available through VEXXHOST’s professional services and designed specifically to reduce operational friction during complex infrastructure transitions.
Either way, the focus is the same: continuity, security, and long-term maintainability without disrupting patient care.
A Platform That Understands Healthcare Workloads
Healthcare workloads are anything but one-size-fits-all. Some, like genome sequencing, are compute-intensive and require GPUs. Others, like EHRs, depend on consistent uptime and storage reliability. Atmosphere supports both, using Kubernetes to orchestrate scalable, self-healing clusters.
Cluster API driver for Magnum allows users to spin up Kubernetes clusters quickly, while built-in Ceph storage handles PACS images, AI models, and longitudinal health records with resilience and scale. For edge cases or latency-sensitive applications, Atmosphere supports OVN-powered distributed networking and SR-IOV acceleration to ensure smooth performance.
Reliable Operations with Fewer Headaches
High availability isn’t optional in healthcare. From clinical decision support to lab systems, the infrastructure has to be up and secure. Atmosphere includes disaster recovery and backup tools like snapshots, volume replication, and multi-site clusters, that help organizations meet uptime and continuity requirements.
These capabilities don’t guarantee compliance on their own, but they provide the building blocks needed for robust contingency planning as outlined in HIPAA and similar frameworks.
Built-In Support That Doesn’t Sleep
Managing cloud infrastructure isn’t the primary job of most healthcare IT teams and with Atmosphere, it doesn’t have to be. VEXXHOST provides managed services for day-2 operations, including rolling upgrades, proactive patching, and observability with Prometheus and Grafana.
More importantly, VEXXHOST’s engineering team is distributed across time zones to ensure 24/7 coverage. Critical issues get urgent attention, no matter when they occur. That global presence is a safeguard against unexpected downtime in environments where every second counts.
A Foundation for What’s Next
Healthcare needs infrastructure that’s ready for today’s demands and tomorrow’s unknowns. But upgrading infrastructure shouldn’t add more chaos.
With Atmosphere, you get a structured, production-grade OpenStack environment that reflects the realities of care delivery: legacy integrations, tight uptime requirements, and teams that can’t afford to babysit infrastructure. Whether it’s high-throughput imaging or EHR workloads that never sleep, the platform is designed to stay resilient under pressure.
If you're weighing a transition or just want to understand what modernization might look like in your environment, we're happy to walk through it with you. Our team has helped healthcare providers make these moves before and we can help you map the path that fits your pace and your constraints. Schedule a consultation to get started.
