For a Children's Hospital, a Virtualized Infrastructure Simplifies IT Complexities

http://www.ibm.com/software/tivoli/so...

Jon Austin of The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia discusses the potentially lifesaving results of a virtualized infrastructure.

In many of our clinical areas of expertise and in our cancer research we are delivering world-class care for children for many types of diseases, both post-birth, congenital, neonatal, and in our cancer research facilities we are searching for cures to help kids.

At Children's Hospital, the infrastructure we provide is a base for over 100 various applications tied together in the various ways they need to be in order to provide clinical services, administrative, financials, web presence in Internet. It's a mixture of a variety of technologies and applications.

Traditionally in an environment like ours the complexity, the difficulties that you may have run into has been that you may have too many very small applications and such, a thing we're moving away from.

The IBM products we bring to the table to help us deliver what we need to at Children's Hospital include Tivoli Monitoring, Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus and Network Manager, and Tivoli Storage Manager.

Children's Hospital has been making use of a number of these Tivoli products for, I believe well into 10 years, and I've had this pleasure of a career and this wonderful treasure trove of experiences as the products have evolved over the years.

A couple of years ago, Children's Hospital started its journey into virtualization, into the cloud as it were, mainly at the physical data center level through virtualizing operating systems and servers

The cost savings we achieve with that are obviously environmental. They are equipment costs, maintenance, service over time, and all of that with no loss of workload ability, functionality or availability. It's just a total win.

• Category

  Science & Technology