We all know Texas gets HOT during the summer, right now it’s about 95 but the heat index says 104. It’s nice to remember back to mid December when I traveled to Boston Medical Center (BMC); they had a blizzard that dropped close to 2 feet (luckily I got out of Logan before it hit)! Boston was a little chilly but I had a wonderful time visiting the IT staff at Boston Medical Center.
When I go visit customers, I’m usually there to capture their story on film. As it turns out, Boston Medical has a lot of cool stuff going on within their infrastructure that I ended up with two videos. When even @MichaelDell tweeted about the videos – you know it’s good stuff!
BMC, like many other organizations, needed to lower costs and work within smaller budgets while dealing with data explosion, sprawling server farms, rising energy costs and the need for users to access records anytime for patient care. In order to help streamline their data center, BMC implemented a virtualization strategy that would make life in the data center simple with the help of Dell consultants who performed a SAN assessment. From the assessment, they found that their expensive Fibre Channel SAN was only 20-40% being utilized. BMC installed Dell EqualLogic PS6510X, PS6500E and PS5000XV arrays, which support a virtual desktop deployment and a large database cluster. “Immediately we began saving between $100,000 and $150,000 in Fibre Channel port costs which corresponds to a three-year payback for our investment,” says Brad Blake, CTO, Boston Medical Center.
BMC is also doing a desktop virtualization project running on Dell PowerEdge R710 servers, Dell PowerEdge R910 servers and EqualLogic PS6500E arrays. Microsoft Windows Servers 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Services provides the platform for a virtual desktop infrastructure.
“I’m a person that really needs to see something in order to believe it. In desktop virtualization all the data sits on the centralized storage, so performance is critical,” says Blake. “So, when we actually ran our tests on EqualLogic iSCSI, we were absolutely blown away by the results. EqualLogic was head and shoulders above the rest.”
Watch the videos and read the case study on just how BMC is doing this.
Time for me to get back to the Texas heat instead of day dreaming of snow…
