VDI gets the nod at Kentucky healthcare provider
Back in February, while Louisville, Ky., was defrosting after a freak storm buried the city in ice, IT exec Brian Cox was dreaming not of warmer climes but of desktop virtualization.
Back in September 2008, while Louisville, Ky., was recovering from a wind storm that left much of the city without power, IT Director Brian Cox was dreaming not of gentle breezes but of desktop virtualization.
FAQ: Desktop virtualization
The storm left Cox, who is director of IT customer service at Norton Healthcare, scrambling to create temporary desktops for about 200 employees from an outlying billing office who had been knocked off the power grid. “You can go for a day or two without power and get caught up, but once the outage hits three or four days, if you’re not getting your bills out the door, especially with time-sensitive Medicare and Medicaid, you don’t get paid for services you provided,” he says.
Three days into the outage, Cox began setting up workers at PCs in training rooms and other temporary spots and loading up their applications. “If we had had desktop virtualization in place for them, many could have worked from home, a different office or contingency location like a hotel and have had access to their applications right away. We would have been able to say, ‘OK, log in here just like you do from the office,’ and they’d have been back to work in no time.”
Fortunately, the situation wasn’t as dire as it could have been. Norton already had embraced a virtual desktop infrastructure for the company’s five hospitals, plus a few specialized cases. One of those special instances involved moving billing types that required no “human touch” onto the virtualized infrastructure — meaning, onto hosted desktops in the data center. “When the power went out, the billing office, the lady running those systems was able to work from home and she got 50% of the bills out the door,” Cox says.
From hospital floors to satellite offices
Since the end of 2007, the IT team has deployed 950 virtual desktops, mostly in Norton’s five hospitals, for physician and nurse access to a host of applications, including the main healthcare information and picture archiving systems. “We’ve been able to run just about every single application we’ve tried on the virtual desktops,” Cox says.
Previously, Norton used Citrix Systems’ MetaFrame client/server technology to provide access to the healthcare information system, but that had become too limiting. Users wanted to be able to tap into more than just that one application from a terminal, he says.
For the virtualized desktop infrastructure, Norton uses VMware View (formerly VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, or VDI) running on 10 IBM 3850 M2 hosts. Norton has been sprinkling thin clients throughout the hospitals, from which physicians, nurses and other personnel can access applications once they’ve been authenticated via the hospital’s Sentillion single sign-on system. Most clients are Wyse Technology terminals, but Norton also has repurposed some older desktops with a VMware overlay, Cox says. Windows XP is the current operating system in use.
Norton provides LAN, wireless LAN and WAN access to the hosted desktops.
The regional healthcare system is now looking to push outside the clinical realm and get as many other people on virtualization as it can, Cox says. Today virtual desktops account for about 15% of the total number of PCs at Norton, Cox says. The goal, he adds, is to hit the 30% mark by year’s end.
Procedural complications
That Norton has been using desktop virtualization for nearly two years and has such aggressive growth plans makes it a bit of an anomaly among enterprises today. While lots of enterprises are tinkering with this maturing technology, not many have embraced desktop virtualization to its fullest, analysts say.
“Desktop virtualization deployments are growing, but not as fast as you might think given how fast server virtualization grew,” says Bernard Golden, CEO of HyperStratus, a consulting firm specializing in advanced IT technologies.
“Compared to server virtualization, desktop virtualization has many more moving parts and so many more parts of the organization are affected by that. So that becomes a greater challenge to prove out the finances, and coordination takes longer,” he says. “Assuming you’re going with a VDI approach, where you’re hosting desktops on a server, then you’ve got to rearrange your backend, do your provisioning, identity management — there are a lot of piece parts to get right.”
Future-proofing the desktop
But for Norton, Cox sees nothing but the positive in desktop virtualization. Time to deployment for virtual desktops has been” just phenomenal,” plus change management, control and security updating are highly streamlined.
Cox points back to business continuity as one major benefit. Another is ease of getting a new hospital in the system up and running. “In VMware View Manager, we can say we need 100 machines, plug in MAC addresses and the thin clients boot and configure themselves,” he says.
And a third benefit is improved application performance across the WAN, an increasingly important part of Norton’s infrastructure as the organization grows beyond its downtown campus. Besides that outlying billing office, for example, many physicians’ offices are 20 or more miles away from Norton’s downtown campus. “If we put them on virtual desktops, they only need to see screen refreshes,” he says.
“Getting more and more virtualized,” Cox says, “will only help us in the future.”
Schultz is a freelance IT writer in Chicago. You can reach her at bschultz5824@gmail.com.
