IBM Virtualization Technologies Simplify St. Louis Hospital’s Data Center

IBM Virtualization Technologies Simplify St. Louis Hospital’s Data Center

IBM (NYSE: IBM) and St. Anthony’s Medical Center of St. Louis today announced that IBM has been selected as the strategic technology vendor for the healthcare facility. By consolidating its data center and implementing IBM virtualization technologies, St. Anthony’s Medical Center estimates it will save more than $1 million in administrative and IT costs. The consolidation includes the hospital’s entire computer operations, including archiving of patient test results and X-rays to enhance overall patient care.

In September 2003, St. Anthony’s Medical Center’s IT department was facing a common technology challenge — the lack of data center space. Departments within the organization had separate IT budgets and were working with different vendors which caused the group to operate in a siloed environment. The center’s IT department was charged with overseeing the entire infrastructure but saw little coordination within the hospital in terms of requests for hardware and defining the system requirements needed to run applications. Due to increased computer and hardware requests, St. Anthony’s considered either adding additional racks full of servers to their already full data center or possibly even building a new data center within the hospital to help support the growth of the hospital.

“The demand from around the hospital was surging against us like a tidal wave,” said Rick Faszold, Manager of IT Systems for St. Anthony’s Medical Center. “Without IBM’s recommendation and thought leadership around virtualization, we surely would have drowned.” Because of space constraints, St. Anthony’s turned to IBM and IBM Business Partner Lowery Systems, Inc., to simplify its data center requirements with the use of storage and server virtualization technology to reduce its server sprawl in half.

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