VMware Helps Interior Health Authority of British Columbia Improve Patient Care and Radically Reduce IT Costs

VMware Provides Scalable, Reliable Application Platform for Windows, Delivers Predictable Application Performance to Help Ensure Better Care

PALO ALTO, Calif. — VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, today announced that the Interior Health Authority (IHA) of British Columbia has standardized on VMware’s industry-leading virtualization and management suite, VMware Infrastructure 3, to improve the resiliency, manageability and performance of essential applications while cutting costs for the western Canadian government agency.

IHA provides healthcare services to more than 750,000 residents of British Columbia through a network of 183 hospitals and offices across the southeastern portion of the province. With the volume of electronic data growing by orders of magnitude in recent years, IHA found itself adding as many as 10 hardware servers each week to keep pace with business demands. The space requirements and costs made that pace unsustainable. IHA brought in VMware to help the agency gain control over its IT environment by reversing the server sprawl and providing a more efficient way to manage critical applications and data stores.

“We needed to make a change and the VMware platform was the key enabler,” said Kris Jmaeff, information system security specialist, Interior Health Authority. “We wanted to get a handle on our hardware requirements and, just as importantly, we wanted an application environment that could scale reliably. VMware addressed both those issues and much more. By giving us greater control and predictability over application performance and availability, VMware is actually helping us improve patient care. And over the long run, it should deliver millions in cost savings by slashing server procurement dramatically.”

Jmaeff estimates that VMware has already allowed IHA to avoid purchasing more than 200 physical servers. IHA is currently running approximately 250 virtual machines (VMs) in two datacenters that are fully redundant, helping to ensure resiliency and rapid disaster recovery. All the virtual machines are managed centrally via VMware VirtualCenter. Nearly 95 percent of the virtualized applications are Windows-based, including Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and SQL Server, as well as Oracle databases and various custom applications for billing, scheduling and patient care.

In addition to the business imperatives that VMware helped IHA address, virtualization has also helped IHA successfully implement a green initiative. The amount of power required to run and cool IHA’s datacenters has been cut by nearly 85 percent due to virtualization. Not only does this reduce carbon emissions by millions of tons, it has generated an annual savings of over $70,000 for IHA.

“We considered a number of options before selecting VMware,” said Jmaeff. “After looking at offerings from Microsoft and others, it became clear the VMware platform could provide simplified and centralized management for all our VMs as well as the high availability, automation, and performance that we needed. And our decision has paid off with massive savings and big advances in IT resiliency. Now that we’ve abstracted the applications from the commodity hardware, we can relocate a VM in seconds if a box breaks. Users aren’t impacted. That’s invaluable in a healthcare environment.”