NY hospital cuts power bill with thin-client virtualization

It hopes to reduce its annual electricity bills by $170,000

New York City's Saint Vincent Catholic Medical Centers is saving power and money by replacing its desktop computers with thin clients running virtualized operating systems.

Saint Vincent's has virtualized more than 600 desktops so far, said Chris Hansen, the system architect for the hospital network. Eventually, it will replace all 5,000 desktop PCs with thin-client devices.

Pano Logic supplies the thin clients. The OSes -- all Windows XP at present -- are streamed from a VMware ESX virtualization platform.

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.

New York City's Saint Vincent Catholic Medical Centers is saving power and money by replacing its desktop computers with thin clients running virtualized operating systems.

Saint Vincent's has virtualized more than 600 desktops so far, said Chris Hansen, the system architect for the hospital network. Eventually, it will replace all 5,000 desktop PCs with thin-client devices.

Pano Logic supplies the thin clients. The OSes -- all Windows XP at present -- are streamed from a VMware ESX virtualization platform.

By using thin clients rather than full-featured PCs, the hospital system could save US$170,000 a year in electricity costs, Hansen estimated. Although additional power would be consumed by the servers to run the virtualized OSes, and by the storage arrays to house user data, running 600 thin clients would still consume only a quarter of the power required to run 600 desktop computers, he said.

The hospital is conducting operational tests to get an even better estimate of the power savings.

While server virtualization is all but mainstream by now, desktop virtualization has remained on the fringe of corporate IT for several years. Analysts are optimistic that it may become more widely adopted in the year to come, thanks to pressures from thinner budgets, soaring electricity bills and the growing complexities of desktop client management. If so, Saint Vincent's is on the cutting edge of this trend.

Saint Vincent's runs numerous medical facilities in and around New York City, with St. Vincent's Hospital Manhattan, founded in 1849, being the anchor for the institution.

The hospital is no stranger to virtualization. It has already virtualized most of its servers, consolidating 300 physical servers into 6 hosts, first using VMware's ESX 3.5, and now VMware VSphere 4.0.

With success on the server side, Saint Vincent's looked at virtualizing the desktops. Its employee desktops are nearly a decade old, many still running Windows 2000. But rather than embarking on a hospitalwide refresh, the IT team first compared the costs of purchasing new PCs with the cost for thin clients.

Most thin-client technologies use a form of VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure), in which the entire desktop is streamed from a server. With this setup, the desktop is replaced by a thin-client device, which streams its OS and applications from a server. A PC can consume an average of 100 watts or more while in operation, whereas a thin-client device will consume less than 10 watts.

In the hospital's price comparison, the cost of procuring thin-client devices and support servers turned out to be about the same as buying PCs, Hansen said. However, the savings in electricity costs from thin clients would be considerable.

"We found that the power consumption was going to be dramatically lower with VDI," Hansen said

For Saint Vincent's, power costs are no small issue. The hospital is one of the largest users of power in the city and is looking to cut consumption wherever possible. And since the hospital has been hit with budget woes of late, trimming operational costs anywhere possible has become a necessity.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.