Saint Vincent's has virtualized more than 600 desktops so far, said Chris Hansen, the system architect for the hospital network. Eventually, it will replace all 5,000 desktop PCs with thin-client devices.
Pano Logic supplies the thin clients. The OSes -- all Windows XP at present -- are streamed from a VMware ESX virtualization platform.
By using thin clients rather than full-featured PCs, the hospital system could save US$170,000 a year in electricity costs, Hansen estimated. Although additional power would be consumed by the servers to run the virtualized OSes, and by the storage arrays to house user data, running 600 thin clients would still consume only a quarter of the power required to run 600 desktop computers, he said.
The hospital is conducting operational tests to get an even better estimate of the power savings.
While server virtualization is all but mainstream by now, desktop virtualization has remained on the fringe of corporate IT for several years. Analysts are optimistic that it may become more widely adopted in the year to come, thanks to pressures from thinner budgets, soaring electricity bills and the growing complexities of desktop client management. If so, Saint Vincent's is on the cutting edge of this trend.
Saint Vincent's runs numerous medical facilities in and around New York City, with St. Vincent's Hospital Manhattan, founded in 1849, being the anchor for the institution.
The hospital is no stranger to virtualization. It has already virtualized most of its servers, consolidating 300 physical servers into 6 hosts, first using VMware's ESX 3.5, and now VMware VSphere 4.0.
With success on the server side, Saint Vincent's looked at virtualizing the desktops. Its employee desktops are nearly a decade old, many still running Windows 2000. But rather than embarking on a hospitalwide refresh, the IT team first compared the costs of purchasing new PCs with the cost for thin clients.
This site is produced by