Networking major Cisco, Seattle Children’s, a child
healthcare center, Diebold, a provider of self-service and security delivery
systems; and Seattle University, are revolutionizing the way they deliver
information to doctors and nurses, automated teller machine (ATM) users, and
university students and faculty using the Cisco Unified Computing System and
desktop virtualization.
Desktop virtualization that connects devices such as thin
clients, tablets and smart phones with applications and information centrally
stored in data centers rather than on PCs or laptops, is being adopted across
industries because it reduces costs, helps to secure data, and improves
performance.
The hosted virtualized desktop market is forecast by
analysts to accelerate through the next two years to an estimated 70 million
units by 2014, 15 percent of all enterprise desktops/laptops worldwide.
Seattle Children’s, Diebold, and Seattle University are
among the thousands of companies benefitting from the unique UCS computing
model, which integrates computing, network, storage access, and management in a
single cohesive system that reduces management complexity, requires less
infrastructure, improves IT agility, and reduces the overall total cost of
ownership.
“Our Cisco UCS decision was a game-changer. It’s not
just ideal for desktop virtualization, it also proved to be the right platform
for our server virtualization, security infrastructure, and management
efficiency,” said Jake Hughes, chief technical architect at Seattle
Children’s.
At Seattle Children’s clinicians were accessing 6,000
workstations and 400 applications through a system that was becoming
increasingly difficult to use, and complex for IT to support and manage.
Denali Advanced Integration helped Seattle Children’s to
deploy a solution with Citrix XenDesktop hosted on Cisco UCS to centralize
information and applications in the data center.
The solution improved application performance, increased
scalability (up to 120 users per server blade with no performance degradation)
and eliminated service outages due to incompatible components.
“Feedback from our clinical users has been overwhelmingly
positive. They can walk into a patient’s room and within seconds access all
their information — it’s much more efficient and provides more time for
patient and provider interaction,” said Wes Wright, vice president and
chief technology officer at Seattle Children’s.
“Based on the survey and test results, Cisco UCS won
in every category of comparison. UCS was the only platform that could configure
eight blades per chassis with up to 100 virtual machines per UCS blade, and
deliver predictable performance to scale our ATMs in the field,” said Mark
Kropf, emerging technologies, Diebold.
Using Cisco UCS as the computing platform for VMware
View, Diebold created “thin ATMs” — information is centralized in
Diebold’s highly secure data center with very little hosted on the ATM itself,
while remote display technology presents the ATM user interface to customers.
By Telecomlead.com Team
editor@telecomlead.com