At hospitals around the country, thin is in.
As healthcare CIOs look to get their budgets into better shape, many are choosing a thin client strategy using virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) technology to simplify and secure their IT environments.
Hospitals in particular face unique IT challenges. They tend to have more PCs than people because doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers are often on the move and require nearby access to information. In a 24-hour period, a nurse may need to log in to several different workstations, while each workstation may be used by six or more people during that time. A single workstation, however, may be in use for only a fraction of the day. The result is a high-maintenance, low-utilization infrastructure.
VDI is a perfect fit for hospitals because it addresses their two key challenges: high cost and high maintenance. With a VDI environment, hospitals create a single “gold image” of their desktops, create pools of virtual desktops, and then access them via thin clients that cost much less than a desktop and last twice as long.
Instead of managing a thousand different desktops, the IT department only needs to manage one desktop image and replicate it as many times as needed. In addition we can leverage application virtualization technologies which makes it much simpler for IT departments to roll out new applications and apply fixes, patches, and upgrades to every user.
The adoption of VDI also supports another key strategic initiative for healthcare CIOs: mobility. Increasingly, doctors and hospital staff are using mobile devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets) to access information. Mobility does lead to higher productivity for healthcare workers, but it also introduces concerns about security, particularly in regard to patient information. The ability to use a single, consistent information portal for both mobile devices and thin clients allows IT departments to more easily enforce security and business policies across devices.
As attractive as desktop virtualization is to hospitals, CIOs do need to be cautious about moving too quickly. A VDI environment can place additional stress on your data center that could negatively impact the end-user experience. For example, data centers often experience a surge of activity when hundreds (or thousands) of users log in at the same time, often known as a “morning storm.” If the storage environment is not properly architected to handle this “storm” end users could experience slow response or not be able to access their desktop at all.
One way to mitigate some of the risk associated with a VDI rollout is to leverage a Converged Infrastructure. A converged infrastructure solution will help further consolidate a hospital’s IT hardware and realize higher cost and management benefits. In addition, Converged Infrastructures have reference architecture documents for various solutions such as VDI to give customers a solid framework for their VDI infrastructure.
HP’s ConvergedSystems provide a complete infrastructure—servers, flash storage, and networking—in a single, pre-integrated solution. The result is faster time to value because the HP ConvergedSystem is delivered fully integrated which results in VDI being deployed faster and HP provides unified support for all the components which removes any “finger pointing” when calling for support.
If your business is considering the move to virtualized desktops, talk to Rolta AdvizeX. Our VDI assessment can ensure you have the right infrastructure in place to support your new lean, mean, IT machines. ▪