Franciscus Hospital achieves ‘unprecedented’ VDI performance

Franciscus Hospital initiated a desktop virtualisation (VDI) project to make electronic patient records readily available to doctors and nurses from any device, while maintaining the privacy and security of its patients’ medical data. During its transition to VDI, the hospital’s IT team faced several challenges including budget restrictions, poor end user experience affecting patient care and staff efficiency, a Windows 7 migration, and shortcomings in its disaster recovery strategy.

“Initially, the Electronic Patient Record System users were somewhat concerned about the adoption of the VDI deployment,” said Jan van Tillo, IT Manager, Franciscus Hospital. “For the medical staff at Franciscus the most important factor, which is also the hot button of any VDI deployment, is fast logon times into the desktop sessions. Atlantis ILIO is the fastest solution on the market we have found – starting applications in the VDI environment is faster than dedicated PCs, and the VDI sessions automatically get ‘refreshed’ after four hours so we never use unneeded capacity. Atlantis ILIO allowed us to migrate to Windows 7 as the desktop platform, provided super-fast logon times, and a very smooth roll-out of the desktops to our employees.”

“Poor IT performance and mobility issues have a severely detrimental effect on staff efficiency in hospitals,” said David Cumberworth, VP of Sales, EMEA, Atlantis Computing. “Medical staff ends up wasting precious time that could be spent with patients. Our Atlantis ILIO solution perfectly addressed these challenges for Franciscus Hospital by optimising its existing storage and boosting performance while reducing its overall deployment risks. Helping the hospital get back lost staff time while staying within budget was very rewarding.”

With Atlantis ILIO, Franciscus Hospital was able to address all of these issues and increase the return on investment of its existing EMC storage. In fact, user feedback was so positive that the entire hospital was migrated to Citrix XenDesktop after just 12 weeks by Insight.it, an Atlantis Computing partner. The final solution includes more than 300 applications and enables the hospital to run 800 concurrent sessions for 1,600 desktops in total.

“It’s common for us to see end user performance issues such as logon times taking more than ten minutes in standard Windows 7 migrations and VDI projects,” said Leon Wijnhoven, CTO, Insign.it. “At Insight.it we’ve developed best practice reference architectures that include Atlantis ILIO, which we implemented with Franciscus Hospital. We’ve found that the solution provides the highest IOPS per desktop, reducing logon times to seconds instead of minutes, and reduces overall costs, which we saw at Franciscus Hospital.”