Virtual desktops to the rescue

Back in September 2008, while Louisville, Ky., was recovering from a wind storm that left much of the city without power, IT Director Brian Cox was dreaming not of gentle breezes but of desktop virtualization.

FAQ: Desktop virtualization

The storm left Cox, who is director of IT customer service at Norton Healthcare, scrambling to create temporary desktops for about 200 employees from an outlying billing office who had been knocked off the power grid. "You can go for a day or two without power and get caught up, but once the outage hits three or four days, if you're not getting your bills out the door, especially with time-sensitive Medicare and Medicaid, you don't get paid for services you provided," he says.

Three days into the outage, Cox began setting up workers at PCs in training rooms and other temporary spots and loading up their applications. "If we had had desktop virtualization in place for them, many could have worked from home, a different office or contingency location like a hotel and have had access to their applications right away. We would have been able to say, 'OK, log in here just like you do from the office,' and they'd have been back to work in no time."

Fortunately, the situation wasn't as dire as it could have been. Norton already had embraced a virtual desktop infrastructure for the company's five hospitals, plus a few specialized cases. One of those special instances involved moving billing types that required no "human touch" onto the virtualized infrastructure -- meaning, onto hosted desktops in the data center. "When the power went out, the billing office, the lady running those systems was able to work from home and she got 50% of the bills out the door," Cox says.

From hospital floors to satellite offices

Since the end of 2007, the IT team has deployed 950 virtual desktops, mostly in Norton's five hospitals, for physician and nurse access to a host of applications, including the main healthcare information and picture archiving systems. "We've been able to run just about every single application we've tried on the virtual desktops," Cox says.

Previously, Norton used Citrix Systems' MetaFrame client/server technology to provide access to the healthcare information system, but that had become too limiting. Users wanted to be able to tap into more than just that one application from a terminal, he says.

For the virtualized desktop infrastructure, Norton uses VMware View (formerly VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, or VDI) running on 10 IBM 3850 M2 hosts. Norton has been sprinkling thin clients throughout the hospitals, from which physicians, nurses and other personnel can access applications once they've been authenticated via the hospital's Sentillion single sign-on system. Most clients are Wyse Technology terminals, but Norton also has repurposed some older desktops with a VMware overlay, Cox says. Windows XP is the current operating system in use.