Consolidation and Virtualization Services — Increase Control and Reduce Administration

If your healthcare organization is typical of the industry, 80 percent of your IT budget is probably spent supporting legacy infrastructure and applications, like patient information and electronic medical record applications, and the data they generate. What if you could free up an additional 10 to 20 percent of your budget? What would it mean to you, your staff, and your organization?

Healthcare IT managers and executives who can look up from the short-term crisis in front of them to the long-term changes achievable through virtualization and server, storage, and network consolidation are in a position to have a game-changing impact on their organizations.

A study Logicalis completed for a large enterprise in another record-intensive industry, for example, showed that server and storage consolidation could reduce the total cost of ownership of the company's IT environment from $12.8 million over five years to $5.2 million.

On a smaller scale, a Logicalis healthcare customer found through virtualization that the company was able to reduce the three-year cost of the customer's infrastructure by $831,918, a savings that might be even more vital to a small company than the millions that can be saved in a Fortune 500 company. The timeframe for the cost recovery for this project was 4.24 months which is typical for consolidation and virtualization projects.

Complexity of the overall healthcare IT infrastructure is the most common problem tackled via consolidation. In our experience, virtualization of servers allows organizations like yours to reduce the number of physical servers you need by an average ratio of 12:1, with a potential of more than 20:1.

Issues driving the need to consolidate servers, storage, and networks at healthcare organizations:

• Healthcare IT infrastructure growth over the past few decades has been based on getting an application into production as rapidly as possible.
• The relatively low cost of Wintel-based servers enabled a major change in the production of new applications. Wintel IT was justified on the basis of one application/one server. That approach was then extended to UNIX, Linux, and other platforms.
• The one application/one server model eliminated the due diligence required for sharing resources. Applications that ran on their own server no longer had to work together.
• Low utilization of resources has been the inevitable result. The average utilization of a Windows server during normal business hours is under 10 percent, and the average utilization during peak hours is under 15 percent.
• Managing, maintaining and supporting the proliferation of servers and storage devices, in turn, have become increasingly expensive and complex—and asset management, from a technical and a financial standpoint, has become increasingly difficult.

Contact your Logicalis Rep who is ready to help you build your business case.