Paris Community Hospital cures IT infrastructure challenges with VDI

The hospital was seeking to dramatically simplify the management of its IT assets and reduce the time and effort spent on maintaining an environment of legacy hardware and aging desktops. With an IT department of four staff to manage 500 machines, the organization was finding it difficult to provide timely and efficient service to users.

By rolling out Scale Computing’s HC3 solution, virtualization, servers, storage, and backup/disaster recovery have been brought into a single, easy-to-use platform. All of the components are built in, including the hypervisor, without the need for any third-party components or licensing. HC3 includes rapid deployment, automated management capabilities and a single-pane-of-management, helping to reduce mundane daily tasks, saving time and money.

Connection management is provided by Leostream, connecting users to desktops and applications in on-premises data centers, the cloud and across hybrid environments. Leostream enables IT administrators to deploy and manage desktops and establish access control rules from a single-pane-of-glass interface. Previously, it could take up to a week to add a new user to the Paris Community Hospital system. With Scale Computing and Leostream, it takes less than two hours. Additionally, working with Scale Computing and Leostream has saved on resourcing costs, as other solutions require double the IT management staff.

“Our existing infrastructure was a hotchpotch of technologies and devices. Over the lifetime of this technology we certainly got value for money, but high maintenance and replacement costs were highlighting a diminishing return for our small, lean organization,” explained Edgar Weeks, information services manager, Paris Community Hospital. “The Scale Computing and Leostream solution has made an incredible difference - we can have a new version of an application on every desktop within half a day. If a staff member moves from one department to another, using the new VDI solution, it’s just a matter of adding them to some Active Directory groups, and in less than a minute, we can have them on the system. In just a few clicks, they can have their own desktop.”

“By implementing the Scale Computing and Leostream system, the Paris Community Hospital IT team has made significant savings in money and time compared to its previous infrastructure and alternative options from rival suppliers,” commented Jeff Ready, CEO and co-founder, Scale Computing. “They now have a highly efficient solution that enables them to spend significantly less time on admin and more on strategic IT activities.”

Implementing Scale Computing and Leostream has addressed the longstanding problem of failed security risk assessments at the edge. Doctors and nurses can login from anywhere to the system and still remain compliant. Because the system requires each user to log in with their Active Directory credentials, it has eradicated the problem of generic sign-ins, making it much easier for the hospital to pass security risk assessments.

The VDI solution has also made it possible to retain and reuse older equipment. Weeks said: “When we take old equipment out of service we can turn them into dumb client devices by installing Leostream Connect. We’re not tossing away old technology, we’re just using it as dumb client devices and the desktop runs very fast on them because it’s running off the server base. This means there’s no more three-year refresh cycle for us.”