Ed Ricks, VP Information Services & CIO at Beaufort Memorial Hospital, discussed his experience switching to a virtual server environment within the hospital with theCUBE co-hosts, David Floyer and Dave Vellante, live at VMworld 2013.

Ricks described the 200-bed Beaufort Memorial Hospital as the perfect community hospital, free of any business alliance with any other health system. The area is a popular retirement place, which shapes up specific, different requirements for customers regarding the type of service they expect.

Ricks said the virtualization process started five years before, upon his arrival at the hospital. “We were among the early adopters. We had to push a lot of vendors to help us do a lot of things,” to meet all the industry’s FDA regulations, Ricks recalled. The hospital now has 225 servers in virtual environments, about 90 percent of the physical servers have been virtualized along with  95 percent of the apps.

When business needs virtualization

Asked about the business outcome of the move, Ricks explained, “my goal is to make sure we can deliver healthcare quickly, efficiently, safely,” having limited resources – 8 tech employee department which includes help-desk  personnel that supports over 2000 users. At the moment of the virtualization project, the hospital also introduced new software applications and a single sign-on solution. It went from 175 physical servers to only 15 legacy ones that are outside the virtual environment.

Watch the full interview with Ricks below:

 
Backup and security are big challenges due to the countless regulations governing healthcare and the sensitivity of data stored. Over the past two-and-a-half years, Ricks’ team has implemented a system where all live data replicated, and there are two different backup systems, one geographically far from the hospital. Hurricanes are frequent in the area, so geographic isolation was important. As part the disaster recovery plan, a real-time backup solution is integrated in the environment which backs up all priority applications and data.

“Our main healthcare application is a proprietary database,” Ricks noted, which works fast with EMC backup. The VMware virtualized environment, the Cisco components, and EMC are working well together. “We’ve looked at other things in the backup and storage space, but we’d lose the fact that they all blend together.”

Where do we go from here?

Asked what areas he would like to see EMC improvements on, Ricks said that one of their evaluation criteria for IT is the adoption rate of physicians that use their software applications. Anything that helps increase the adoption rate and reduce login time on desktops is greatly needed. “Technology should not be a barrier to what they’re doing,” he said.

Ricks’ advice to other hospitals or healthcare companies going through a similar transformation was to think carefully about how their data is protected. “I would definitely say that data is the most valuable asset we have as an organization,” other than the personnel. “Protecting that data is what helps me sleep at night.”