VMware Helps St. Vincent Catholic Medical Centers Enhance Patient Care, Streamline Operations By VSM News Staff published: Tuesday, December 02 2008
Renowned Healthcare System Virtualizes 85 Percent of Infrastructure
in 90 Days; Expects to Save $3.4 Million in Move to All-Digital, All-Green
Infrastructure.
PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--
VMware, Inc. (NYSE:VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions
from the desktop to the datacenter, today announced that St. Vincent
Catholic Medical Centers of New York City has deployed VMware's
industry-leading management and virtualization suite, VMware
Infrastructure 3, to provide a reliable, flexible and cost-effective
platform for clinical and administrative applications as well as St.
Vincent's test and development environment.
St. Vincent is one of New York's most respected healthcare providers.
The St. Vincent system treats nearly 150,000 patients each year and is
anchored by St. Vincent's Hospital Manhattan, which also serves as the
academic medical center for New York Medical College. The St. Vincent
system recently underwent a financial and operational restructuring that
provided the organization with an opportunity to reengineer its IT
infrastructure. As a result, St. Vincent adopted a virtualization
strategy to improve the performance and availability of mission-critical
applications, accelerate the rollout of new systems, reduce capital and
operating costs, and provide St. Vincent with the flexibility to evolve
along with the healthcare industry in the years ahead.
"Over the course of just a few months, the VMware platform helped St.
Vincent move into the 21st century and improve the healthcare
experience for our patients while delivering tremendous ROI," said Tony
Antinori, vice president of technology, communications and operations at
St. Vincent. "In our emergency department, for example, we've increased
the availability of essential applications. In turn, that has increased
the number of documents we can process 100-fold. That means we can treat
many more patients in less time. We've accomplished this while reducing
our expected hardware, power and cooling costs by $3.4 million over the
next three years, which is helping us maintain solid financial footing."
Nearly 85 percent of St. Vincent's production environment has been
virtualized, including clinical, emergency and pharmacy applications as
well as business and administrative applications from Cerner, Blood
bank, GE, and PatientKeeper, to name a few. St. Vincent's entire
pre-production environment is also virtualized. The next major
virtualization project is a scheduled desktop replacement of St.
Vincent's traditional PCs with thin clients and VMware Virtual Desktop
Infrastructure. Currently St. Vincent's has deployed zero foot print
clients to their emergency department in conjunction with VMware VDI
technology to work around some WAN latency issues and has boosted
employee performance in the emergency department instantaneously. Both
the datacenter and desktop virtualization efforts are part of St.
Vincent's larger strategic plan to have an all-digital, all-green IT
infrastructure.
After making the decision to go virtual, St. Vincent considered
offerings from Citrix, Microsoft and VMware. Ultimately, the selection
was based on VMware's ability to provide a comprehensive solution and
broad toolset rather than point products or a standalone hypervisor.
VMware's complete solution includes centralized management via
VirtualCenter, high availability thanks to unique features such as
Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and VMotionTM, and
innovative memory management that have made application performance in
the virtual environment superior to performance in St. Vincent's old
hardware-based environment.
"VMware has had a positive impact on nearly every aspect of our
operations," said Kane Edupuganti, director of IT operations and
communications at St. Vincent. "For instance, we were on the verge of
having to move our entire datacenter. The VMware platform instantly
allowed us to shrink the datacenter footprint and get ready for the
move, though we did not go forward with the move. We have a
consolidation ratio of 35 virtual machines to each physical host which
has also allowed us to maintain a small footprint in our datacenter if
the need ever arises to move in the future. Virtualization has also
provided us an instant hardware refresh for all our old servers in the
datacenter. IT is now seen as a strategic enabler, not simply a cost
center. The flexibility of our virtual infrastructure is helping to
improve everything from regulatory compliance to our ability to
innovate. VMware has been a big win for St. Vincent and our patients."
About VMware
VMware (NYSE:VMW) is the global leader in virtualization solutions from
the desktop to the datacenter. Customers of all sizes rely on VMware to
reduce capital and operating expenses, ensure business continuity,
strengthen security and go green. With 2007 revenues of $1.3 billion,
more than 120,000 customers and more than 20,000 partners, VMware is one
of the fastest growing public software companies. Headquartered in Palo
Alto, California, VMware is majority-owned by EMC Corporation
(NYSE:EMC). For more information, visit www.vmware.com.
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