Virtualization of MEDITECH MAGIC with VMware ESX Virtual Infrastructure 3.5

A New Breakthrough in Reducing TCO in the Healthcare Industry

Summary
New Age Technologies has customer case studies written as early as 2003 demonstrating the cost savings and improved service levels directly related to the advanced capabilities and reliability of a professionally engineered virtual infrastructure. The ROI and improved system benefits described in this report are applicable to traditional virtualization infrastructures deployed for Microsoft and Linux operating system platforms. This paper will also address some of the special aspects and performance characteristics of implementing virtualization for the MEDITECH application running on the MAGIC operating system platform. Due to the rapid realization of ROI and the sizeable number of healthcare organizations running the MEDITECH MAGIC system in test, development, and production environments, the successful virtualization of this solution was a significant breakthrough for this healthcare provider, and can provide major benefits for other MEDITECH healthcare providers as well.
 

Out of respect for the privacy of the clients’ corporate policies the organization will remain nameless. To convey the massive scope of this project, it is important to note that this organization is one of the nation’s leading healthcare providers having over 180,000 employees. Their network of facilities includes over 100 hospitals and over 100 outpatient centers across 20 U.S. states and England, and in 2007 alone the company brought in revenues over $20 billion. The number of MEDITECH systems virtualized in this environment will be over 3,000 at the end of the project deployment at multiple sites.

Challenge
Having numerous mission critical production applications with compliance, privacy, and security being of vital importance, this organization was dedicating one application per server. Costs of hardware, software, and maintenance were drastically increasing with the company’s growth, causing extreme pressure by management to cut costs. It was also a goal to improve their SLA’s, which included enhanced disaster recovery capabilities.

While this healthcare IT organization had become very familiar with virtualization technologies since the release of VMware Virtual Infrastructure version 2.5, and were aggressively implementing it in their Windows/Intel infrastructure across test, development, QA, and production systems, the MEDITECH team had been told that the MAGIC application was not going to run in a virtual machine environment. Having years of advanced system integration experience in the healthcare industry contributing to their reputation for having one of the most complex and knowledgeable virtualization practices in the world, New Age Technologies was uniquely situated to take up this challenge.
 

Situation
The MEDITECH support team at this healthcare organization had difficulty getting MAGIC to run in a virtual machine on VMware ESX version 2.5, but after the release and installation of VMware Virtual Infrastructure version 3.0, New Age Technologies was successful in a test environment to reliably deploy the MEDITECH MAGIC system in a virtual machine as a proof of concept in the following environment:

•Two processor multi-core Dell PowerEdge servers
•EMC CLARiiON and Symmetrix Fibre Channel SAN storage.
 

This project moved from test and development into a full QA cycle, bringing in selected markets such as nursing, pharmacy, and admissions. After these tests were validated and completed, the project moved into a full production deployment across local and remote data centers, facilities, and other healthcare environments using MEDITECH MAGIC.

Defined Customer Project Goals
The project goals were in line with many business goals for the organization:
•Server consolidation that tied in with annual technology refresh and lifecycle management initiatives
•Platform foundation for business continuity, disaster recovery and high availability
•Reduced environment costs by saving on cooling, air conditioning, electrical usage, and network ports
•Improved central management with streamlined provisioning, configuration, resource management, and user management
•Streamlined hardware-independent server deployment
•Better server utilization which allowed information systems and support resources to pool hardware resources effectively
•Increased flexibility to reuse and dynamically reallocate computing resources to servers as workloads change
•Protecting and securing data to meet HIPAA and other government or regulatory compliance initiatives

 

 

Solution and Results

We have learned from this study and with other clients that an organization doesn’t need large amounts of physical servers to benefit from this solution.

The solution outline in this white paper included:
 

Hardware	Software
150 Dell PowerEdge 2900 – 2CPU, Quad Core, 32GB Memory	MEDITECH version 5.6.1 with MAGIC operating system version 9.0 and 9.0 SMP Server Systems
EMC CLARiiON Fibre Channel SAN	VMware Virtual Infrastructure Enterprise – ESX 3.5
EMC Symmetrix Fibre Channel SAN	VMware VirtualCenter Server 2.5

Results with ROI and TCO
For most organizations, Data Center Servers are under-utilized and more expensive than anticipated initially to run and manage.  An ROI and TCO calculation can help organizations see the current “Before VMware” cost of ownership for server infrastructure compared to “After VMware” simulation.  This calculation will quantify the cost savings, productivity improvements, risk reduction and business benefits of utilizing VMware Infrastructure. 

 

Hardware cost savings were an estimated $4.5 million
Achieved server consolidation ratio of 8:1
Increased flexibility and responsiveness to business needs
Decreased operational costs, including:
Increased high availability and Disaster Recovery capabilities

View a VMware TCO Case Study on Server Consolidation Here

Consulting Services and Onsite Engineering
New Age Technologies provided consulting services to assist with assessment, design, execution and training as part of the ADEPT methodology.  The following areas were addressed during the project phases:

•Assessment and design of all aspects of the Virtual Infrastructure (VI)
•Implement and configuration VMware VI3 Enterprise Edition and VirtualCenter Server on Dell server hardware
•Advanced VI3 enterprise feature implementation specific to the MEDITECH MAGIC environment to include VMotion, High Availability (HA), and Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS)
•Creation of standard Windows image templates for virtual machines (VMs)
•Scripting to deploy new VMs for estimated 1,050 MEDITECH servers
•Defined and documented best practices related to physical storage and network design specific to the MEDITECH MAGIC environment
•Transfer knowledge of the VMware architecture and configuration specific to the MEDITECH MAGIC environment to client technical resources
•Operational Readiness to client operations resources
•Document and project management

 

 

Learn more about our services and ADEPT methodology
and contact us for more information.