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Huntsville Hospital
IBM BladeCenter®
Virtual Client Deployment
Slide: Largest community-owned, not-for-profit hospital in Alabama
Slide: 881 licensed beds
Slide: More than 44,000 inpatient admissions annually
Slide: More than 120,000 emergency visits annually
Slide: 650 physicians, 2000 nurses and 5400 employees
Slide: 250,000 outpatient annually
David Carlisle, Manager, IT Networks & Systems
Huntsville Hospital
[00:20] When there is a disaster, we need to be rolling. The physician or nurse expect when they touch the keyboard for instantaneous results. We try to operate as if it were one of our family members laying in that bed. If my mother is sitting there and they need access to information systems, we want to have it there immediately.
The challenge
Performance, cost and density
Tony Wilburn, Network Specialist III
Hunstville Hospital
[00:40] We had a lot of old equipment here in Huntsville Hospital. Three data centers, we were using up a lot of real estate. We wanted to consolidate it to one data center.
David Carlisle, Manager, IT Networks & Systems
Huntsville Hospital
[00:51] We needed a scalable solution that would provide savings on both the front end and the back end, for redundancy, for fail over for business continuity, and disaster recovery.
Choosing the right solution
Virtual Client Solution
[01:00] We ran about a three month pilot program using the IBM BladeCenter® and VMware® solution with resounding success. We decided to pull the trigger and jump in completely.
Tony Wilburn, Network Specialist III
Hunstville Hospital
[01:10] The deeper we got into it, the more we saw that this could be a catch all solution for our servers, desktops, remote access, everything in one package.
Shawn K. Scott, Network Specialist II
Huntsville Hospital
[01:21]Our strategy has been to provide those point-of-care instant services to doctors. So we use a virtualized web-based SSL VPN to provide these virtual desktops to the doctors that are available from anywhere. The doctors can go home and do their charting and do their reviews, do their consults and monitor critical situations without their having to be at the hospital to do so.
David Carlisle, Manager, IT Networks & Systems
Huntsville Hospital
[01:43] This is one of those solutions where you don’t realize how great it is until you actually put your feet in it and start working in it
Shawn K. Scott, Network Specialist II
Huntsville Hospital
[01:51] It is changing the way we do business. It’s changing the way we interact with all types of doctors in our facility.
David Carlisle, Manager, IT Networks & Systems
Huntsville Hospital
[01:56] The IBM VMware solution allows us to consolidate our server firm from three data centers to less than one data center. We can install roughly 15 to 20, 25 servers depending on the load per blade. Our desktop solution we can get 63 to 68 desktops per blade. It gives us secure, data network integrity, in that none of the data that is being accessed by any of the pc’s ever leaves the data center.
Tony Wilburn, Network Specialist III
Hunstville Hospital
[02:22] The desktops now are kept on the SAN, So you don’t have a single hard drive failure that’s going to take you down. The same way for the blades. We can loose a blade, we can loose a chassis, and we can still keep going.
Cost savings
Power and cooling
Shawn K. Scott, Network Specialist II
Huntsville Hospital
[02:38] One of the biggest complaints from a lot of communities is how much these large super massive data center’s consume. That doesn’t have to be the case any more.
David Carlisle, Manager, IT Networks & Systems
Huntsville Hospital
[02:44] From an environmental’s perspective, cooling, air, power, we have been able to realize 70 to 75 percent savings.
Shawn K. Scott, Network Specialist II
Huntsville Hospital
[02:54] The IBM BladeCenter® cooling is honestly much better, much more efficient than a lot of the other vendors. We’ve actually lost air conditioning in our data center before and the blades stayed up and stayed running.
Availability
David Carlisle, Manager, IT Networks & Systems
Huntsville Hospital
[03:06] Availability’s huge. We can deploy a server within 10 minutes. So there’s speed, there’ s no cabling involved.
Shawn K. Scott, Network Specialist II
Huntsville Hospital
[03:12] The blades and BladeCenters® are built so well that they can manage themselves. With VMware® just makes it better. There are management tools available for the BladeCenters® that forewarn you many days ahead of time if anything is wrong. Once you furnish your virtual server on a blades, it is there, regardless of waiting on hardware, not waiting on hardware, it’s much quicker to get up and running and it’s much less problematic now. The blades and VMware® take care of themselves.
David Carlisle, Manager, IT Networks & Systems
Huntsville Hospital
[03:36] I find it somewhat amusing I came from this large regional healthcare, you know, up in the northeast and I come down to little old Huntsville Hospital, which isn’t so little after all, and here we are on the cutting edge of technology, and providing services to the staff and physicians at Huntsville Hospital. It’s really very cool.