Disaster Can Inspire Quick Move to Desktop Virtualization

Most companies that launch or rapidly increase their use of virtual desktops do it to cut their support costs or increase security. Many are now also considering virtual desktops as a way to migrate to Windows 7 with a minimum of cost and hassle, according to analysts.

But sometimes, Mother Nature provides her own impetus for virtualization. A major disaster led the University of Texas Medical Branch-a sprawling campus of hospital and office buildings in Galveston plus a spray of clinics and smaller facilities all over Texas-to shift virtual desktops from a fringe technology to its main platform.

"We realized after Hurricane Ike (in Sept. , 2008), when people were coming in here with PCs that had been flooded out, asking us to put them in a closet so they could use them remotely, that that was ridiculous; we didn't need to be doing this," says Landon Winburn, Citrix systems administrator for the University of Texas Medical Branch.

To continue reading, register here and become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.

Most companies that launch or rapidly increase their use of virtual desktops do it to cut their support costs or increase security. Many are now also considering virtual desktops as a way to migrate to Windows 7 with a minimum of cost and hassle, according to analysts.

But sometimes, Mother Nature provides her own impetus for virtualization. A major disaster led the University of Texas Medical Branch-a sprawling campus of hospital and office buildings in Galveston plus a spray of clinics and smaller facilities all over Texas-to shift virtual desktops from a fringe technology to its main platform.

"We realized after Hurricane Ike (in Sept. , 2008), when people were coming in here with PCs that had been flooded out, asking us to put them in a closet so they could use them remotely, that that was ridiculous; we didn't need to be doing this," says Landon Winburn, Citrix systems administrator for the University of Texas Medical Branch.

[ For timely virtualization news and expert advice on strategy, see CIO.com's Virtualization Drilldown section. ]

Hurricane Ike, which had already battered Cuba and gained strength in a westward trip over the warm water of the Gulf of Mexico, swept north, coming ashore at Galveston at 3 a.m. Sept. 13, 2008, with winds up to 110MPH, damaging three quarters of the houses in the city before moving on to ravage the rest of East Texas. It killed 72 in the United States and caused $29 billion in damage before it eventually blew itself out in northern Arkansas.

With the hospitals and clinics frantically busy treating the injured, lost and homeless, UTMB's IT crew had to get as many data and applications online as they could in the days following the storm.

Rather than rescue and then maintain each of the PCs and servers damaged or drenched by Ike, Winburn and his colleagues bought 100 licenses for Citrix Systems' XenDesktop and hosted the rescued machines on Citrix servers.

"We converted a lot of PCs into virtual machines, and we no longer had to keep running to individual offices to work on them," Winburn says.

The newly virtualized systems weren't quite as simple to support as the 2000 machines UTMB had already set up to use more traditional Citrix Systems shared virtual desktops as part of a 2005 migration to an electronic medical records (EMR) system. But they were easier than sending technicians out to troubleshoot hardware problems in remote, storm-ravaged locations, Winburn says.

Unfortunately, the same setups and requirements that had satisfied the medical departments and most of the branch offices, most of which were won over because 30 or 40 users could work happily on a single T-1 with a Citrix setup, couldn't meet the needs of the other departments.

Even extending an implementation of performance- and environment-management applications from from AppSense-which cut login/logout times to a few seconds compared to as much as a minute-didn't help get most of the 6000 to 7000 PC users in UTMB's research, academic and business departments on board.