4-page Case Study - Posted 2/20/2009

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Baptist Health

Healthcare Provider Simplifies Application Packaging and Delivery with Virtualization

Baptist Health, the largest not-for-profit healthcare provider in southern Florida, delivers high-quality medical care with the help of an IT environment that includes 8,000 computers and 700 applications. Packaging and delivering applications to workstations was time-consuming, complex, and costly. Baptist Health needed a way to quickly package and deploy a diverse set of applications, eliminate application conflicts, and ensure the continuity of mission-critical services. The company deployed Microsoft® Application Virtualization (App-V), part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack for Software Assurance, to deliver virtual applications as services. With App-V, Baptist Health created an efficient, uniform application infrastructure that eliminated application testing and conflicts, cut staffing requirements, and reduced application time-to-delivery by 50 percent.

Situation

The largest not-for-profit healthcare provider in southern Florida, Baptist Health is renowned for medical and service excellence. It manages five hospitals and nine outpatient facilities, and provides home healthcare services for thousands of patients. In 2008, Baptist Health accepted more than 66,000 hospital admissions and more than 450,000 emergency room, urgent care, outpatient, and home care visits. The health care provider has more than 12,400 employees, not including our medical staff of 1,900 and physicians, and had a total operating revenue of U.S.$1.9 billion in 2008.

To help Baptist Health employees deliver high-quality care quickly and efficiently, the IT staff supports an information environment that includes approximately 8,000 computers and 700 applications. The IT department had developed a mature management model, packaging applications with .MSI files and delivering them to workstations using Microsoft® Systems Management Server 2003.

Delivering applications could be time-consuming because many of the applications at Baptist Health required inconsistent packaging methods. IT had to allocate 40 hours to package an average application—and some applications took nearly 400 hours to automate—then more time was required for QA and co-existence testing. It took IT an average of six weeks to deliver a new application to workstations.

Because Baptist Health was running so many different applications, it had to manage the increased risk of application conflicts and perform complex co-existence testing before deploying new applications. “In healthcare, there’s no cutting corners in terms of applications,” says Jack Fetter, Senior Systems Engineer at Baptist Health. “You have to do everything you can to minimize application conflicts because the clinicians rely on them for patient care.”

Even with extensive and time-consuming testing, IT could miss potential conflicts before delivering an application, and then have to repackage the application, which required more time. Also, with such a large environment of critical applications, Baptist Health wanted an efficient way to maintain a disaster recovery environment, especially in southern Florida’s hurricane environment.

Many applications at Baptist Health run on a particular version of software, while other applications may require older or newer versions of the same software. Because different versions of the same software can’t run on the same computer without conflicting, Baptist Health would have to run the applications on different workstations or risk breakdowns. “Getting older applications to work along with the new applications was becoming a huge, critical issue,” says Fetter.

Baptist Health needed a more consistent, efficient, and reliable way to package applications and accelerate time-to-delivery for new services. It also wanted to reduce the number of staff it needed to dedicate to application packaging, delivery, and repair.

Solution

Baptist Health was first introduced to application virtualization technology in 2005. “It took us by surprise. We knew about operating system virtualization, but hadn’t heard about application virtualization,” says Max Sorondo, Systems Supervisor at Baptist Health South Florida. “The fact that it could run applications side-by-side that normally conflicted would be enough to pay for itself. When Microsoft acquired the technology, the price became even more attractive.”

Microsoft Application Virtualization clearly represents the future. By isolating applications, we created a stable base that… makes packaging and deployment easier, faster, and risk-free Jack Fetter Senior Systems Engineer, Baptist Health South Florida .

Baptist Health began deploying App-V by virtualizing IT applications, and then moved to clinical applications, including Sovera by American Management Systems, Centricity Perioperative Manager from GE, and HDM by 3M. Using the wizard in the Microsoft Application Virtualization Sequencer feature, Baptist Health packages each application, then deploys the virtual package to computers using Systems Management Server. IT administrators also use Systems Management Server to perform tasks such as inventories and workstation audits.

Baptist Health delivers applications to appropriate workstations between 2:00 a.m. and 5:00 a.m., when most users are not likely to be on their computers. Once the virtual application is delivered to the client computer, administrators use Systems Management Server to put it into cache. After they publish the appropriate icon to the desktop, the virtual application is available to the user.

With App-V, the IT staff can sequence applications only once and, in most cases, runs those sequenced virtualized applications on personal computers and terminal servers. “When we realized there was a Microsoft App-V client for Terminal Services, and that we could sequence for the desktop and deploy the same application to Terminal Services with Citrix Presentation Server installed, we were thrilled,” says Fetter. “In the past with .MSI files, we would have had to sequence the application separately in many cases.”

The Baptist Health IT staff applied their existing .MSI packaging knowledge to virtualization sequencing, enabling them to quickly integrate App-V into their existing processes. The company intends to update its system management from Systems Management Server 2003 to Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007, to take advantage of enhanced management features such as Branch Distribution Point and WakeOnLAN functionality.

To make troubleshooting the virtual environment easier, Baptist Health uses the MDOP Diagnostic and Recovery Toolset. “It’s a complete set of run-time diagnostic tools that let you see what's happening at the operating system level as well as inside the virtual environment,” says Fetter.

By early 2009, Baptist Health had virtualized 50 applications and deployed the Microsoft Application Virtualization client to 8,000 workstations. About 5,000 employees use the virtualized applications.

While the IT department plans to keep packaging runtime and core applications with .MSI, the bulk of applications at Baptist Health will be virtualized. The company expects to eventually move from what was a 100 percent .MSI environment to a 10 to 15 percent .MSI environment. “Microsoft Application Virtualization is our standard now,” says Fetter. “Every time we build a new machine, it will have the Microsoft client. And as existing applications are upgraded or replaced with other vendors’ products, they’ll all be virtualized, too.”

Benefits

Using Microsoft Application Virtualization, Baptist Health has created an efficient, uniform application packaging and delivery infrastructure with which it can quickly deploy applications in a demanding environment.

“Microsoft Application Virtualization clearly represents the future,” says Fetter. “By isolating applications, we created a stable base that doesn’t change when applications are deployed or updated. That makes packaging and deployment easier, faster, and risk-free.”

In healthcare, there’s no cutting corners in terms of applications. You have to do everything you can to minimize application conflicts because the clinicians rely on them for patient care. Jack Fetter Senior Systems Engineer, Baptist Health South Florida

Eliminated Application Testing and Conflicts

Because Baptist Health delivers applications as services instead of installing them on individual computers, applications can’t conflict with others on the same machine. Now the IT department no longer has to perform rigorous compatibility tests before delivering new applications. “The biggest benefit for us has been eliminating co-existing testing,” says Fetter. “It was so time-consuming and so difficult to do effectively—and now we simply don’t have to do it. This really helps simplify deployments.”

By eliminating conflicts, Baptist Health can now run any applications side-by-side on the same computer, even if one application runs a different version of Oracle or Pervasive SQL than another. And, it can run applications such as Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server and Windows Server® 2003 Administration Tools Pack—which in the past couldn’t run together—on the same computer. It no longer has to isolate applications on different computers or require people to use two different computers.

Reduced Time-to-Delivery by 50 Percent

Baptist Health can package virtualized applications much faster because the process is so simple. Instead of an average of 40 hours, it takes only 4 hours for IT to package each virtualized application. Because IT could eliminate co-existence testing and most troubleshooting, it can deliver applications in two to three weeks, instead of the six weeks it previously took from request to delivery. “In extreme situations, we can even package and deliver an application overnight,” says Fetter.

Reduced IT Staffing Requirements

By streamlining sequencing and eliminating testing, Baptist Health can support its application infrastructure with 75 percent fewer dedicated packaging staff. Now only 4 packaging and 2 QA personnel can handle the same workload that used to require 16 packaging and 7 QA staff.

Simplified Application Repair

With Microsoft Application Virtualization, Fetter expects to reduce the IT department’s help-desk burden. “Instead of taking two to three hours to get a problem application working, you can—in just a few seconds—flush out the changes since the application was deployed and simply right-click to repair the application,” he says.

Enhanced System Agility and Disaster Recovery

Using the App-V client for Terminal Services, Baptist Health can create a parallel application environment for disaster recovery while making it easy for employees to access their applications using their office computer, a back-up site, or another computer in their home. “We’ve tried this with 30 applications that were originally packaged for the desktop and every one of them has worked perfectly in the terminal server farm,” says Fetter.

Because virtual applications don't conflict with one another, IT no longer has to dedicate groups of servers to host specific applications or ensure certain applications aren’t installed on the same server. In fact, Baptist Health pre-stages all virtual applications on every one of the presentation servers, in effect making any server capable of hosting any application. “We can now quickly add additional servers to an application pool by simply publishing the already-installed virtual application, a process that literally takes seconds,” says Fetter. “What we end up with is a powerful server farm where every box is a clone of the others. Applications are already there waiting to be hosted and growth is as simple as adding additional servers. No consideration for application compatibility or co-existence is necessary.”

Windows Vista
Windows Vista can help your organization use information technology to gain a competitive advantage in today’s new world of work. Your people will be able to find and use information more effectively. You will be able to support your mobile work force with better access to shared data and collaboration tools. And your IT staff will have better tools and technologies to enhance corporate IT security, data protection, and more efficient deployment and management.

For more information about Windows Vista, go to:
www.microsoft.com/windowsvista

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com

For more information about Baptist Health South Florida products and services, visit the Web site at:
www.baptisthealth.net