3 What’s Holding


You Back? Szymanski began the push


for using virtualization at UPMC in 2005, but ran into a stumbling block—major electronic health record (EHR) vendors had not yet adapted their applications to run on virtual servers. Since then, however, such vendors as Cerner Corp., Epic Systems Corp. and McKesson Corp. have implemented support for virtual machine (VM) platforms. That lack of vendor support


for VM environments held back virtualization in healthcare IT, IDC analyst Scott Lundstrom wrote in a recent white paper. Another factor in healthcare organizations’ slow adoption of virtualization is size— plenty of them have IT operations that are too small to benefit from virtualization. But hospital consolidation is creating larger hospitals from smaller ones, and that process inevitably will make using virtualization more attractive. Although very small hospitals may


still be on the sidelines, medium- sized and large hospitals have embraced virtualization with full force—the bigger the hospital, the more servers to virtualize, the greater the savings. UPMC is the largest employer in western Pennsylvania and the second-largest employer in the state, according to Szymanski. In its study of UPMC’s virtualization initiative, IDC’s Health Industry Insights market research group estimates the organization has avoided $80 million in capital and operating costs from 2005 to 2008.


When Less Is


a Good Thing Even so, smaller organizations


are able to do much more with less than ever before. “We save $3,500


per server every time we provision a virtual server,” said Robert McShinsky, senior systems administrator at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, NH. Meanwhile, the South Central


Foundation in Anchorage, Alaska, is benefiting from keeping its IT staff lean—only four engineers are needed to manage 120 virtual servers.


“There’s no way we could have done that without [using] virtualization,” said Chris Smith, South Central’s operations director and CIO.


Success with


Clusters Adventist Health, which describes


itself as the largest nonprofit Protestant healthcare provider in the U.S., began by running Cerner’s medical charting application on virtual servers. Now it is in the middle of a push to using virtualization that encompasses all branches of IT. “In 2008, things really started to explode,” Hite said. Needing to refresh its hardware and to run more instances of the


Cerner application, Adventist Health expanded the number of its VMware Inc. virtual servers. Since then, the organization has enlarged its virtual server clusters to host new systems and has continued consolidation at the same time. Plans include implementing its picture archiving and communication system, or PACS, on virtual servers. In addition to deploying storage


and virtual server clusters at the organization’s main data center in Lake Mary, Adventist Health rolled out similar deployments on a smaller scale at its constituent hospitals, which range in size from a few dozen beds to several hundred. (Overall, AHS-IS, the information services division of Adventist Health, handles IT for 26 of the system’s 37 hospitals, and has 500 employees in nine states.) Currently, the organization’s


typical configuration is a cluster of three VMware hosts connected to an IBM N Series or NetApp Inc. storage device. Hite also is evaluating desktop virtualization. “It’s good that data is not on the desktop. The more we can


Meet Our Dedicated Virtualization Specialists


And Fix Your IT Ailments Cut costs and server sprawl when you consolidate your data center


with virtualization strategies from HealthConnection. By implementing a virtual solution, you can shrink your infrastructure and optimize utilization for better IT outcomes. Our virtualization specialists are skilled technologists. They carry certifications from leading manufacturers including HP and VMware. And they can design and deploy custom solutions that meet your healthcare organization’s needs.


Call your Account Manager today for more information. 1.800.395.8685


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