North Shore Medical Center Provides Better Support with AMD Processor-based Solutions: Case Study

North Shore Medical Center had been receiving complaints from staff about the time and resources required to log onto systems, place orders, and conduct IT maintenance. Workflow was being routinely disrupted, and the data center could not scale to add new servers.

NSMC chose the HP ProLiant BL45p and BL25p blade servers powered by AMD Opteron processors to run VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). It replaced the older terminals with AMD Geod processor-powered HP Compaq T5720 machines, and later upgraded to AMD Sempron processor-powered HP Compaq T5730 systems. Back-end support for the thin-client solution was established with VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3, running on HP BL 685c blade servers powered by Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors.

The VMware, HP and AMD Opteron processor based server consolidation strategy enabled the organization to meet its needs with fewer servers, reduced the existing data center's 150 servers to 94, with 86 of those running virtualized. The thin client solution reduced log-in time from as much as five minutes down to just seconds or a minute at most; the enhanced server performance gave clinicians a smooth, uninterrupted workflow; and the reliability and flexibility of the infrastructure reduced help desk calls significantly.