Case Study - TeleData delivers application deployment solution for explosive growth healthcare provider.

Customer

Client provides user level healthcare services nationwide in over 800 locations.  Expanding operations are projecting 2500 locations by the end of 2009.

Recently acquired by a Fortune 50 organization, our client now has the locations and access to expand operations nationwide.  With a considerable investment by its parent company, this organization is poised for success.

Statement of Problem:

Locations were being deployed rapidly and client was experiencing large growth in their Citrix environment.  They were under some strain with managing, maintaining, and delivering consistent reliable printing to end-users. Bandwidth constraints and increased volume were elevating the visibility of these issues.

The customer was not experiencing adequate user density, given the current hardware in use. This was requiring rapid adoption of additional application servers at a rate that (with current growth projections) would not be practically feasible. There was no unified storage solution in place, as well as the absence of a virtualization solution. 

TeleData’s Solutions:

TeleData understood the explosive growth dilemma from previous engagements, and the challenges associated.  The first initiative was to rapidly deploy additional application servers to ease the performance burdens. Secondly we provided reliability and speed on the application side for printing.  Developing a data-driven printer mapping model to minimize session-based printing, and adopting TCP/IP network printing from a central location, has provided the clinics with an extremely high level of reliability. 

The void of unified/shared storage at the datacenter was preventing high availability solutions like clustering and HA/DRS.  With storage rental prohibitively expensive, TeleData assisted with creating specifications and engaging in vendor selection and the purchase of a SAN.  Implementation of the SAN has eliminated roadblocks to database clustering, email expansion, development, and virtualization projects. 

With an abundance of hardware resources, and the inability to use them fully, our client was faced with rising costs to keep ahead of user demand.  The identification of a virtualization solution not only satisfies hardware utilization issues, but also provides several high availability, rapid deployment, and hardware containment capabilities.  Using VMware VI3 Enterprise (with VirtualCenter), there is a significant consolidation achieved, as well as dynamic resource load balancing.  Server deployments using the automated tools included in VMware and Citrix have reduced deployment times exponentially, providing the ability to respond to growth demands.

Results

Despite infrastructure challenges from the corporate office to the datacenter, TeleData has shown the expertise and technological direction to poise our client for continued success.  The scalability of the environment is now at a level this organization requires for their future needs.