Liverpool Hospital Goes Virtual

The Liverpool Women's Hospital in northern England expects to shave at least $1 million off its IT costs over the next few years thanks to an ambitious virtualization project.

The hospital, which serves women in England's fifth largest city, started work on a major overhaul of its aging server and storage infrastructure last year in an attempt to streamline its IT spending and boost efficiency.

Virtualization has already been extended to key clinical applications such as patient records and medical imaging, and the hospital is now considering whether to virtualize the applications supporting its systems for baby tagging and staff badges.

Back in 2004, the hospital appointed Zafar Chaudry as IT director to sort out its antiquated hardware. At that time, the organization relied on five HP and Compaq servers and a Compaq SAN. "The servers were very old and a lot of them had very expensive service costs," explained Chaudry, adding that the SAN was even more problematic. "It was more or less broken -- I had the hardest time getting parts for it," he says.

This infrastructure could only deliver about 92 percent uptime, according to Chaudry. "I sit across the hallway from my chief executive, so when email went down, I was right in the firing line," he explains.The hospital eventually decided to replace its HP and Compaq gear with a mixture of VMware virtualization, Dell servers, and two EMC Clariion SANs. Chaudry explained that the hospital looked at a slew of vendors before making this decision, including HP, Acer, Fujitsu, and NetApp. "The reason why we ended up with Dell/EMC was the single point of contact. They provided the hardware, support, after-sales care, and all the professional services," he says.

Chaudry signed a five-year deal with Dell/EMC, locking in the support and service costs at 2006 prices. "This was the cheapest solution -- service costs typically go up 15 to 20 percent a year," he explains.

As for virtualization, the exec gained experience of VMware's ESX Server during a 15-year spell working in the U.S., which included a stint as the director of IT at Chicago's Belmont Hospital. "We did think about the Microsoft virtualization products [but] I don't think that they are advanced enough yet," he says.

After a six-month roll-out and testing process, the Liverpool Women's Hospital now has a total of 11 virtualized Dell PowerEdge servers split between two data centers, as well as two EMC Fibre Channel SANs and a PowerVault tape library, also from Dell. The organization has just over 10 Tbytes of available storage, of which it is using around a fifth.

Running VMware on the PowerEdge servers has made Chaudry's life a lot easier. "It can take half an hour to provision a server now [whereas] before it was two to three days," he told Byte & Switch.Virtualization has also opened the door to big savings. "Next year we will have to bring 16 new servers online," explains Chaudry, adding that the cost of 16 standalone servers would be around $256,000. With his virtual infrastructure, Chaudry can instead buy just two physical servers and use VMware to provision 16 virtual servers for a total cost of $60,000.

Overall, with savings in hardware, manpower, and services, the IT director expects to save at least $1 million over the life of the contract.

The total deal with Dell/EMC and VMware came in around the $1 million mark, although Chaudry told Byte and Switch that he is happy with a five-year ROI. The hospital, he explains, now has 100 percent uptime, and VMware lets him test new applications without disrupting clinicians and their patients. "We can make a cloned copy of a clinical application," he explains, which can then be tested without affecting the original app.

That said, Chaudry admits that VMware still has its limitations. "VMware doesn't support some applications because they require special connectors at the back of the server," explains Chaudry.

This means that the hospital has had to set aside an additional four Dell servers to run the applications supporting its staff badge and baby tagging systems. "We can't virtualize this until VMware supports them," explains the IT director.The exec is also considering storage virtualization, which is currently being touted by a number of vendors including IBM and Incipient, but admits that he has some reservations. "The technology is not that mature at the moment. Some people are taking a software approach and some are taking a hardware approach," he says, adding that there is still no industry standard.

James Rogers, Senior Editor Byte and Switch