Frederick Memorial Healthcare Virtualizes Its Data Center with Dell, VMware

One of the customers that participated in yesterdays’ press briefing with Dell and VMware was Frederick Memorial Healthcare (FMH), which began providing health services to Maryland residents over 100 years ago.

As the hospital is entering its second century in an expanded facility, Roy Turner, FMH’s server systems engineer, explains how the healthcare provider’s use of technology is key to delivering top-quality care to its patients. For example, FMH is one of the few hospitals in its area with a wireless infrastructure throughout the facility to make information and communication instantly available to care providers.

Dell has helped FMH with IT projects in the past, and the customer trusted the Dell’s advice when we recommended VMware as the leading virtualization technology.

Dell ProConsult Services performed the hospital’s initial data center virtualization implementation using VMware ESX 3.5 and VMware Virtual Center 2.5. Dell helped the IT team deploy 106 virtual servers on six new Dell PowerEdge R900 servers.

FMH asked Dell to help it upgrade to VMware vSphere 4 and the VMware vCenter Server. The Dell Services team worked hard to ensure FMH’s VMware vSphere 4 project was a success, and helped set up an initial environment and test the upgrade path FMH would use for its production environment. Roy and the server engineering team have virtualized over 100 servers, with 75 being converted from physical to virtual, reducing power consumption and cooling in the data center.

Roy spent a little bit of time with us explaining their challenges and how they worked with Dell and VMware.

About the Author: Bruce Eric