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MEDHOST Director of IBM i and Storage Engineering Sandy Workman shares how her team approaches IBM i infrastructure, what the team has learned through its work on MEDHOST PowerCloud with SVC, and why that work matters to customers.
When hospital users interact with their EHR, most will never see the infrastructure supporting it—and they should not have to.
For Sandy, that behind-the-scenes responsibility means continually looking for ways to make the environment more reliable, easier to maintain, and adaptable as technology changes.
This October, Sandy will share some of that work when she co-presents with Shelly Howrigon, Storage Technical SME - Americas at IBM, during IBM TechXchange 2026 in Atlanta. Their session, Client Success in Availability, Flexibility, and Reduced Risk with IBM Storage and IBM i Series, will explore the architecture behind MEDHOST PowerCloud with SVC and the team’s experience supporting IBM i workloads.
We talked with Sandy about the work, what her team has learned, and what it ultimately means for MEDHOST customers.
Sandy: IBM i does not behave exactly like a Windows or Linux workload. The way it handles data and input/output (I/O) is different, so we have to account for that when we design the environment. With MEDHOST PowerCloud with SVC, we designed the compute, connectivity, switching, and storage components to work together as an integrated architecture for IBM i workloads.
The goal is to achieve the performance and reliability we need while giving our team more flexibility in managing the environment.
Sandy: Reliability has to be designed into the environment. You cannot rely on a single component and assume nothing will ever fail. The MEDHOST PowerCloud with SVC architecture includes redundancy across multiple parts of the environment, including Virtual I/O Server (VIOS), storage, backend storage, and switching. We also have failure-isolation capabilities that help limit the impact if something does happen.
Flexibility is just as important when we need to maintain or update the environment. We can move backend storage in and out for service or upgrades without affecting the hosts, and certain maintenance and upgrade activities can be completed without host interruption. That makes it easier for us to maintain the environment and adopt new technology without making every infrastructure change a major event.
Sandy: We have a lot of experience with IBM i and how our environments operate, so our conversations with IBM can get very technical. We can sit down together to discuss how our SAN Volume Controller (SVC) environments are configured, how our IBM i workloads use storage, and what we are seeing from a performance standpoint.
That is one of the things I value about the relationship. We can bring our real-world experience to IBM and learn directly from the people who develop and support the technology. It gives both teams an opportunity to look at what we are seeing and where there may be ways to improve.
Shelly Howrigon has worked closely with Sandy and the MEDHOST team and shared this perspective on the collaboration.
“The performance results they have achieved are inspiring more customers to embrace the validated design that IBM and MEDHOST partnered on. Helping customers like MEDHOST achieve their goals has been a highlight of my career at IBM.”
Shelly Howrigon, Storage Technical SME – Americas, IBM
Sandy: In many ways, the goal is for customers not to have to think about this work. Our team is continually looking at the infrastructure behind the solutions they rely on and asking what we can do better.
Can we reduce the impact of a hardware failure, perform maintenance with less disruption, or isolate an issue more effectively? Can we bring newer technology into the environment more easily? Those are infrastructure questions, but they are all connected to maintaining a stable environment for our customers.
Healthcare organizations depend on their technology. Part of our responsibility is taking care of the technology behind their MEDHOST solutions, including the components they may never see.
Sandy: The practical experience. There is a lot of value in hearing how people are actually using the technology—not just how it works on paper. TechXchange brings IBM experts and customers together, so you have an opportunity to compare experiences, ask questions, and learn from each other.
I have worked with IBM i since 1989, and I still enjoy those conversations. I am looking forward to sharing what our team has learned through MEDHOST PowerCloud with SVC and hearing what other organizations are doing as well.
The infrastructure supporting healthcare technology rarely receives the same attention as the applications clinicians and hospital staff use every day. Yet maintaining that foundation requires ongoing engineering, investment, collaboration, and expertise.
Sandy’s work and that of the IBM i and Storage Engineering team illustrate an important part of how MEDHOST approaches that responsibility: understanding the workload, designing for resilience, continually seeking ways to improve the environment, and working closely with technology partners such as IBM.
Much of that work happens behind the scenes, but it supports the stability customers depend on every day.
Sandy Workman will share more about MEDHOST PowerCloud with SVC and what the team has learned through this work at IBM TechXchange 2026 in Atlanta this October.
Learn more about IBM TechXchange 2026.
