A few years ago, Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center (WFBMC) faced a problem fairly typical of older, very large healthcare organizations: modernization of aging IT infrastructure. As a large research institute and teaching hospital incorporating 125 medical facilities, 11,000 employees and nearly 1,000 physicians, it was especially sensitive to the the need to bring its IT capabilities up to speed and into line with its organizational goals as quickly as possible.

As part of theCUBE‘s pre-VMworld coverage, Shelia Hartness, lead software systems engineer at WFBMC, sat down with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, in the SiliconANGLE Media Studio in Marlborough, MA. The pair discussed how the organization adopted a converged infrastructure platform to completely revamp its severely limited IT capability and how it is innovating to meet the business-critical needs of the future.

IT modernization faced a plague of problems

The decision to revamp the institution’s IT faced a daunting array of challenges from the outset. Budget shortfalls had left what network infrastructure that did already exist in poor shape. The IT department itself was siloed, with different groups responsible for compute, storage and network resources and saddled with poor communication. Additionally, ancient hardware assets would have to be upgraded before any serious attempt at infrastructure modernization could be attempted, according to Hartness.

“So we had a very aging infrastructure, and we were needing to address that drastically, and the budget had been short for a few years,” explained Hartness. “We had aging network, we had aging storage, we had aging compute … just things that had been in place for seven years or more that we needed to bring up to standard so that we would not have any outages.”

The solution: VCE Vblock converged infrastructure

After spending some time evaluating the significant problems, WFBMC management decided that implementing a converged infrastructure architecture was the best solution, and they selected EMC’s VCE Vblock as their platform of choice. Vblock contains best-of-brand compute, storage and network assets in one package, which served the dual purpose of replacing the old assets with new, modern equipment as well as overcoming the IT department’s silo structure, Hartness stated. Because compute, storage and networking now functioned as one appliance, IT employees were now forced to crosstrain in all three areas, which not only improved communication and relationships, but has the added benefit of allowing everyone to develop new skillsets.

“It’s helped to reduce some of the walls for the silo, from a team perspective,” said Hartness. “It caused us to be more collaborative together, [and] it is going to allow us to be more crosstrained so that we understand the environments more.”

Glowing endorsements

Since WFBMC adopted the Vblock converged infrastructure platform, most people involved with the IT, from engineers and IT staff rolling it out, to the end users — the 11,000 employees using it to do their jobs seem to be very happy with it, according to Hartness.

Management feels it has improved communication at all levels, and IT staff are excited about some of the new features it has allowed them to provide to other employees, such as the IT self-service portal. Even WFBMC customers are seeing added benefit: One of the newest services physicians are able to offer patients are virtual office visits. None of this would have been possible without the vast network enhancements brought about by converged architecture, Hartness added.

“So, the infrastructure, or the Vblock, is helping to reduce the time that we are spending figuring out what will work and allowing us to determine more how we can use the platform to build the business and how can we grow and become better in our field. It helps us to grow from a professional standpoint too,” she said.

Watch the complete interview below:

Photo by SiliconANGLE