Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: VMware.

The next BriefingsDirect case study discussion targets how biotechnology services provider Acorda Therapeutics has implemented a strategic disaster recovery (DR) capability to protect its highly virtualized IT operations and data.

See  how Acorda Therapeutics’ use of advanced backup and DR best   practices  and products has helped it to manage rapid growth, cut energy   costs,  and gain the means to recover and manage applications and data   faster.  Also learn how these advanced DR benefits have led to   other data center flexibly and even migration benefits.

Sharing more detail on how modernizing DR has helped improve many aspects of Acorda Therapeutics’ responsiveness is Josh Bauer, Senior Manager of Network Operations at Acorda Therapeutics  in Hawthorne, NY. The discussion was moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: What do you perceive as being  different today about DR than  just a few years ago? Is this really a  fast-moving area?

Bauer: One of the most prominent changes is recovery time.   You no longer need to restore from physical tape and see recovery  times  of upwards of 24 hours, something that we hadn’t seen until  recently.  We implemented Site Recovery Manager (SRM) from VMware and we can now do that same recovery in about four hours.

We're  constantly replicating   using RecoverPoint and we can get data up to  the minute, versus tape,   where you are at the whim of whether the  backup completed on time -- did   everything go to tape, and when was it  done? It could have been two   days ago, versus now, when it's data  that’s 100 percent synced up to a   minute ago.

When we had about 80 employees, we probably barely had a terabyte, and now with 350 employees we easily have over 14 terabytes.

Gardner: I am also wondering, because you are   in the healthcare and  biotechnology field, are there aspects of the new DR   that appeal to  you from a compliance or regulatory perspective as well?

Bauer: Definitely. Four times per year we have to prove that we can recover    all of our software and data by doing a DR test. Until we had SRM, we    had to do it all from tape, from a cold facility, and it would take us  a   day, sometimes a day-and-a-half. That’s just not the best way to do    things. But now, with SRM, we can always do these tests on the fly,  even   from our office, from home, or from wherever.

Gardner: Tell me a little bit more about Acorda Therapeutics.    You were founded in 1995. Tell us what you do, so our audience can    understand the type of company you are and type of products and services    you provide.

Recent growth

Bauer: We create treatments for people with multiple sclerosis, spinal cord injuries, or other neurological disorders. We have two marketed drugs in the market right now, the most recent of which, Ampyra,    helps people with multiple sclerosis walk better, and it has been a    huge success. And that's the main reason we've been growing so much    lately.

Prior to virtualization, we were spending a   lot of time managing our infrastructure, with all those physical servers.    Once we virtualized everything, we spent way less time managing the    infrastructure and could spend more time helping the business.

In    fact, the IT department itself has become less like a computer repair    shop and more like a strategy center. I'm constantly being brought  into   projects to help the business make the right decisions when it  comes  to  any type of technology.

The next logical step would be  to  have my  team spend less time doing these four-times-a-year DR  drills  the way I  described before. With SRM it’s a few clicks. We're  saving so  much time  and we are able to do other things.

Gardner: Tell me how you got to the point today, where you can deal   with  something like 14 terabytes and moment-by-moment backup  capability?

Strategic partner

Bauer: It all really started at VMworld.    That’s been a fantastic way for me to learn what's out there, what's    coming up, and just staying in the know. That’s actually where I met International Computerware, Inc. (ICI), who is one of our strategic partners for storage and virtualization.

I    had approached them with the growth issue. We had already started   doing  virtualization on our own. I had used it at a previous company,   but I  wasn’t familiar with SRM, and it looked like it might be a nice   fit for  improving our DR. So ICI came in and they sort of held our   hands and  helped us with that project.

Specific to storage, they   have also  helped us make sure that we do better management of growth,   anticipate  our growth, and show that we have more than what we're  going  to need,  before the growth happens, and they've done some  analysis on  like what  we have. We brought them in before things got  too bad.

Since using VMware, we've noticed uptime  upwards  of three nines  monthly. Before that, when we were mostly a  physical  environment, it was  nowhere near that much. We had physical  servers  going down all the  time.

VMware immediately gained our  trust,  seeing that they came  out with this product for DR. It was a  name that  we trusted. Then, we  played with it for a while, and it  worked out  fantastically.

It's  all about trusting VMware and  then, again,  ICI, working with them. They  just know their stuff. We  have a lot of  different partners we work  with, but we prefer to use  ICI, because  they really focus on doing  things properly. It's more  about working  with someone that really knows  what they are doing. They  understand  that we have some skills, as well.  They're not trying to  sell us  something we don’t need.

95 percent virtualized

We  are 95 percent virtualized here. The only thing that’s not virtual   is  our fax server, which requires a physical fax board and that’s about    it. Everything else is virtual.

Gardner: So this is across all tiered apps, tier one, three, four?

Bauer: That’s correct, our SQL apps, our Exchange, everything you can think of is virtualized.

Gardner: I understand you're using vSphere 5. You're on vCenter SRM 5. That only came out towards the end of last year. So you just jumped right on that.

Bauer: Oh, I didn’t waste any time. We were very excited about it, especially this new option of using a failback, which wasn’t really part of SRM Version 4.

If  you ever have the very unlikely event of a a disaster, when you do a    recovery, you're now operating off of the disaster equipment or    recovery equipment. While that’s happening, people are still saving    files and generating new data. If you were to just simply turn on the    original equipment again, all that data would be lost. So you need to    fail back to re-sync everything.

With SRM Version 4, you had to    configure two one-way recovery systems. So it would take a lot more    time. But now with failback, it's a lot more smooth, kind of built-in.

Gardner: Do you actually have separate data centers that you are backing up to? What's the topology or architecture that you're using?

Bauer: We have two separate data centers, recovery and production. At the  moment they're only a few towns apart, but we are shopping   around for a  data center much further away. We hope to do that in the   next six  months or so.

Gardner: Looking to the future, one other area I wanted to hit on, which is    important to a lot of folks, especially in some overseas markets, is    this issue about energy. Did you have any impact on energy and/or    storage costs associated with the total life cycle of the data?

Bauer: We reduced the footprint by easily 75 percent by not needing so many    physical servers. That’s a pretty huge shout-out to VMware there.  Also,   we're not using that much power. We don’t need as big a data  center.  Not  as much cooling is needed. There's a whole assortment of  things,  when  you take out all the physical servers.

Gardner: Now,   looking to the future, other areas that people have described as  a  segue  from going to high virtualization, exploiting the latest   technologies  in DR, is to start thinking about desktop virtualization infrastructure (VDI) and desktop-as-a-service. They're even looking at cloud and hybrid-cloud models for hosting apps, then backing them up and recovering them in    different data centers, which you've alluded to. Do you have any    thoughts about where this could possibly lead?

Bauer: In   fact, if you were going to ask me what my next initiative was  going to   be, and you didn’t mention desktops, that’s the first thing  that would   have come to mind. We're starting to explore replacing our  laptops with   virtual desktops. I'm hoping this is something that we  could implement   next year.

Right way to go

This seems like the right way to go, because our helpdesk team spends too much time swapping out laptops or replacing laptops that are dropped on the ground. You're looking at a small thin client,    which is the fraction of the cost of a laptop. Plus, the data is no    longer kept in a laptop. There are no security or compliance issues.  You   can l just give them a thin client, and they are back in business.

It  makes everybody in this company, especially at the   top-level, nervous  to know that some sensitive data still does make it   out to the  laptops. We tell people to save everything to their network   drives,  but without using thin clients and virtual desktops, there's no   other  way to force that.

Gardner: How  about advice for   those folks that might be moving towards a more  modern DR journey, as   you described it? What would you advise to them  as they begin, and what   lessons might you have learned that you could  share?

Bauer: First off, do it. You're going to be glad that you did. The good thing    about this is that you can do it in parallel with your current DR   plans.  You don’t have to change your existing recovery plans. You can   take as  much time as you want to set it up right. And the key is to set   up a  demonstration for the key business owners and players that are   going to  make the decision on the change.

Set it up right with a   handful  of important apps, important VMs, and then just show it to   people. Once  they see how great it works, you're definitely going to   want to change.

It's always helpful to have some outside  help. No matter how skilled   you are, it's always good to have a second  pair of eyes look at the work   that you did, if for nothing more than  to confirm that you've done   everything you could and your plans are  solid. It's helpful to have a   partner like ICI.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: VMware.

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Gardner: Virtualization isn’t just server-by-server, but really impacts the entire data center. You need to think about it more holistically, particularly in regard to things like security,    performance and how your brands and businesses are perceived across   the  globe. Many of the companies that I deal with day in and day out   are up  at 80 percent and even 90 percent virtualized.

When they think about virtualization, they go beyond just server virtualization. It’s really now looking at storage, applications, networks and even the end-user desktop experience, or desktop as a service (VDI).

Successful  virtualization is no longer just about servers, it’s about managing  complexity when you get beyond the 20   percent or 30 percent level and  expand into converged infrastructure virtualization without failures.

So  how to take advantage of the best things  about virtualization? Part of  that means allowing your IT team to have  access to other experienced  support teams, from HP and VMware,  around  the world, 24×7, to help  keep systems up and running. Such support also  allows your IT team to  progress, to learn as they go,  and to be able to  take advantage of  more virtualization benefits over time.

Expert panel

So    how do you go about attaining such benefits? How do you keep the    positive side of virtualization on track? And how do you put in place an    insurance policy around service and support?

Manderson: We have several different packages. Our highest level is the mission-critical.   In this particular process, you're assigned a team that are across the   technology that you have in your environment. But you also get a set  of  folks who would actually look at not just the  reactive support and  even  some of the proactive, but how actually your  entire business is  running according to the ITIL standard.

That    is coupled with keeping you up and running, and we also can work with   you on a  type that would be best suited for your environment.

Our   critical and  independent support includes onsite resources from HP   that also include a  lot of proactive support. In addition, they're more   focused on specific  management, but that would be more of an ITSM technology. We can look at that for you.

... We  also have the hardware and software support. One of the cool things we have  with our hardware support is support automation, our Insight for remote support.   That can notify HP that you're having a disk  drive failure. Or we  will  call you and say that we know that disk drive is  failing, or  something  on a buffer server and storage is about to.

You can   even take  that a step further to look inside at the Windows operating  system.   We're hardware agnostic on that operating system. We don't  care about   the vendor -- and I believe we are looking at expanding  that automation  to  other operating systems. We have installation and  startup services  that  we can actually go out and set up and configure  the hardware and   software at a site.

So    we definitely integrate across all the multi-vendor services. We run    the gamut between all the x86 operating systems, as well as our  proprietary operating systems, our servers and storage. Again, we're no  stranger to multi-vendor support and keeping the entire environment up and  running.

... One of our most creative services would be Proactive Select,    a core product series of credits. You can use these credits for maybe    planning on migration and upgrade. You can say you need some  consulting   time. You can use these credits and work with upgrade and  migration.  You  may need some performance or you may need some type of   environmental  assessment, and these credits can be used for that.

Gardner: When people do employ these services,  how do they measure what the payoff is, the value of these services?

IDC study

Manderson: In 2010, IDC did a study. They went out and looked at the methodology, and this is  out on our website.   They saw that the customers who have the  mission-critical services,   reduce their downtime by over 70 percent, and  increase their return on investment (ROI) quite high, over 400 percent. The main benefit was in problem    management as well as help desk calls, because these were alleviated due    to the proactive nature, a lot of looking at the entire environment,    and looking at the business processes.

So take a look at the  study.   It shows IDC's methodology. So looking at things proactively and these   support processes can  certainly help you reduce that downtime.

... I've been in the multi-vendor space  for many, many years -- from applications to operating systems -- all  with HP.

In   2002, when VMware came on the scene, HP actually  became alliance   partners with them. In 2003, we became a reseller, and  thus began our   support partnership with them. It would only extend  recent in 2005, we   also became an OEM.  We have thousands of trained and certified Microsoft engineers and Linux professionals, too.

But    we have the largest number of VMware-certified professionals. We're    also have the largest global VMware off-site training center. So HP  also  does  education on these technologies as well. We’ve  trained over   20,000 students in the VMware space alone.

And we have had   this  very strong collaboration with VMware for many years and have   support  teams around the globe. In addition, we also offer the same   level of  training that VMware support engineers do. We actually go to   their  facilities and train right alongside them, too.

We further  do  this training virtually. The training is then recorded and made    available on demand for reference, for folks who are not able to attend    a scheduled course. There's definitely a very strong partnership, and    as you see from our history with the other vendors as well as VMware,  we   are no strangers to multi-vendor support.

With all of the VMware products that HP sells, we do provide support across them all. It runs the gamut from the vSphere operating system that will install on the x86 server, through the enterprise management to the vCenter, and virtual desktop infrastructure products like VMware ThinApp. We also support the converter product getting into vCloud Director.

In    addition to that, we have the ability to access our peers on the  other   teams across HP hardware support. This includes servers and   storage,  and our networking chain. We are quickly able to collaborate   with them  and pull together a virtual team in to focus on the   customer's whole  environment, to provide a one-stop shop.

Expertise across technologies

Additionally,   you saw that we’ve been in this multi-vendor support business for so   many years, with many experts across the other technologies, such as   Microsoft and Linux. Of course, the virtual machines (VMs) are running these operating systems. So if the contract is also with    them, we can easily pull them in to help us work an end-to-end  solution  and support it.

Gardner: Let’s think about what happens when there are  different levels of support at work. How does that shake-out?

Manderson: We're in a reactive support business. If the customer has a  problem,   they can either call in at their local region telephone number  --   whether they are in America, Europe, or Asia Pacific. There are    different phone numbers for them to call.

They can also log in    via the web, and they'll get to our next developer Level 1 engineer.    They're a great organization and have solved over 85 percent of their    cases.

If they have issues where they have to escalate, first    they will be collaborating with us. We also have an online chat tool,    where we are all in a virtual room, the Level 1 engineers, Level 2    engineers, etc. So we’ll be consulting and collaborating with them   before they  even get to a point of escalation.

If    the case does end up needing escalation, chances are they're already   collaborating with the first person, and will then end up taking the   case. That  saves a lot of information transfer, as far as what type of   server you  have, what’s the firmware, what build level, and what’s the   problem  there, etc.

Once it reaches Level 2 support, as far as   we can continue  to collaborate, we can reach our teammates and the   hardware teams, too, so  we can look at the server and make sure that   the environment is what we  need it to be. If we can't resolve it, we   can also go to Level 3 with  VMware at an offline service-partner level.

We   have a great  relationship with the folks that we work alongside with   and would escalate  calls to at VMware. We’re obviously not going into   Level 1 at VMware because we’ve  already done all that work, and we are  a  service partner. They'll go  right up to our peers over at VMware  and  then we work together, while  always owning the solution that we  provide  back to the customer.

Another  part of our infrastructure-as-a-support-organization is that  we  have a  single customer database. I can give an example. A call  came  into our  Level 1 French engineer. When this call came in, for the   European  folks, it was already the end of their day, and the French   engineer  could not speak English. It was a critical down, their VMs were    offline.

HP Virtual Room

So    we worked in a virtual room and they talked to us, and brought the    case to us here in America’s time zone. We worked with this case and    another tool called HP Virtual Room, where we could actually all look at the customers' desktops in real time. They happened to have EVA storage, and we quickly got an EVA engineer engaged. Of course, we  had   to find a resource in the Americas because the European folks had    already left. So we're all looking in real-time at the customer’s    environment and found out that they had locked the storage.

The    EVA engineer helped to get back online, while we all watched and the    French engineer was translating in French for the customer in order to   get it all resolved. We got it back online, and the customers were ready   to  home.

We gave instructions on getting log files and we   placed a  call for follow-up for the daytime hours in Europe the next   day. So our  counterparts in European support teams picked that up and   worked with  the customers to resolution, to analyze exactly what   happened and  prevent it in the future.

We have another  process in HP that can   actually go with top organizations, our  escalation  manager process. I  was lead source for a particular case  where we had a  field team  assisting a customer deploying a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) design. They had a third-party VDI vendor. They had HP hardware,    servers, and virtual connects. They had our storage, and we didn’t quite    know where the bottleneck was. They were having performance issues   by  trying to have this VDI at two different locations with the hardware  at   one site.

The escalation manager was able to get the local   office  to borrow equipment, and then try to get performance and    network traces. They had the Engineering Problem Management Resource    (EPMR) lab in Houston trying to duplicate the problems.

Our    escalation manager was able to drive the issue to completion across not    only the solution standards, but the local office, to owning the  actual   escalation with all the action items to keep this all on track.  We  knew  where we were going to go. That was about a six-month case,  but we  did  finally find was that the customer was on the technological  edge,  and the  "pipe" to have that performance just did not exist.

Site visits

Pat  Lampert is a technical account manager and does site  visits. The   technical account managers do go out on site. So we’re  aware of the   environment. We have the information of your environment  documented  into  the database. When you call, we’re not saying, "Now  what kind of  server  is this? What’s the firmware?"    We know this because we already have it documented. We could be   calling  them to say, "Server 3 is running a little off." We already   which know  VMware version this is on, because we have that information.

And    because we have that, we can also offer proactive advice. We can know    that there's a new firmware update, or VMware just came out with a  new   build, and we have a place where you can go find the latest that's    specific to your environment. So this helps to reduce further  incidents,   because we can be more proactive to help you maintain your  business.

Gardner: What are some of the the most frequent questions you receive from the field?

Reddy: I'll address two questions that are frequently showing up. One is, what is the difference between the VMware ESXi image and an HP ESXi image?

Basically,    HP takes the same ESXi image that VMware provides to the customers.  It   then adds HP thin components for hardware management, and it also  adds   any latest fibre channel and network drivers. Once it's tested and  certified, it's available for download both from HP and VMware websites.

Major differences

And   one of the major difference between the two images is that VMware  image  is disk installable only, whereas HP image can be installed on a  disk, USB key, or a SD card.

The other question we're getting nowadays is how to upgrade from VCA4 to VCA5.    As with any major upgrades, planning helps. The first thing I would  do   is understand the difference between ESX 4 and ESX 5, because  starting   with ESX 5, we have no service console. So we need to  understand what   the architectural differences are.

Also learn about the new licensing policies. Then, use the System Analyzer that VMware provides to evaluate the current environments, and    download, check, and complete the checklist. Once this is done,    hopefully the upgrade will go smoothly.

Lampert: Another question that has come up from customers has to do with the   added value  of getting support directly from HP. It was partly   addressed during the  presentation we just gave. First of all, VMware   does have a fine  support organization. I have a couple of friends who work in VMware  Support, and they do a good job of supporting their product.

HP,    in addition to a similar level of expertise in the product, also   offers  our expertise in HP hardware, especially if you have systems   based on HP Blades.    The infrastructure behind that often is tied very closely to the    performance and availability of your ESX host. So when you call us, you    will have not only someone who is very familiar with the VMware   product,  but also is familiar with the HP hardware and able to pull in   the  proper resourced results, problems you might encounter with  running   vSphere on HP hardware especially.

In addition to that,  we have  a  partnership agreement with VMware, and when you call in for  support   through HP, you're getting that same level of service when we  have to  go  to VMware to get answers to questions or fixes.

One  other   question that has come up is about our lab ability to reproduce    problems. We have two global labs, one in India and one in the United    States. We have several static vSphere cluster configurations with a    number of different types of servers already in those configurations,    and the ability, when needed, to add specific models, if there is a    problem that’s specific to a particular Blade or rack-mounted server    model, or a particular card or something like that. So we're quite able    to reproduce most problems that come in. We even have some Dell and IBM equipment in our lab also.

Gardner: What other issues are users grappling with?

Reddy: One question I can answer is how to troubleshoot server crashes. When something goes wrong in ESX, we call it the "Purple Screen of Death."    Often, these are results of hardware failure, but we still need to   rule  out the software. So we collect all the logs, and look at it to   see if  it's a software issue. If it's not a software issue, then we   engage the  hardware team to see how we can get to the root cause and   fix the issue.

Lampert: To dovetail  with Sumithra’s  comment there, one of the questions I get  frequently  is what to do if  you don’t have a dump. Say the host hangs,  and that  seems to be almost  more common than the Purple Screen of Death.  Some  customers are't aware  that through HP’s Integrated Lights-Out  Management, there is the ability to generate a non-maskable interrupt (NMI) just by pressing a button, and by saving a certain environment variable ahead of time in your ESX host.

KB article

There is a KB article on this, by the way, if you just search on NMI and core dumping in    VMware. But with that setup, you can force a dump while a system is in a    hung state, and that will assist us usually in troubleshooting and    isolating what caused the hang, whether it be hardware or a problem with    the ESX host software.

One question that came up ahead  of time is what HP suggests as far as   getting a handle on our  inventory of VMs? I happened to be involved in   field testing some new  tools from HP that will be available in January   and February regarding  vSphere.

One of them is a Holistic Blade   and Firmware Analysis  that takes into account the VMware environment on   our Blade systems  which we are working on having ready soon. We have   just completed  field tests.

And the second is a really nifty   Inventory Report  HP has just put together. We're just completing field   tests on that  now. It will be available soon. Basically, we install a   small Perl script in the customer environment on any machine that has access to the vCenter host and has a vSphere CLI installed.

This Perl Script crawls through the VMware environment and builds an XML file, which we then feed into a report generator here at HP. This can    be used for us to gather information on customers, so we have ahead  of   time a clear picture of the environment. But also it will be sold  as a   service to customers.

The   report is really quite nice,  with all sorts of charts and showing   availability of machines and  availability of memory and also disk space.   It's a very nice report.

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Gardner: You've been successful with server virtualization, but what made it important for you now to   extend virtualization to the desktop?

Brames: One of the things that is important to our district we noticed when doing an assessment   of our infrastructure:  We have aging endpoints. We had a need to  extend  the refresh rate of  our desktop computers from what was typical  -- for a  lot of school  districts typical is about a 5-year refresh rate  -- to  getting  anywhere from 7 to 10, maybe even 12 years, out of a desktop computer.

By going to a thin client model and connecting those machines to a virtual desktop, we're able   to  achieve high quality results for our end users, while still giving   them  computing power that they need and allowing us to have the cost   savings  by negating the need to purchase new equipment every five   years.

By going with   virtual environment, the problem that we  were looking to solve was   really just that -- how do we provide  extended refresh rate for all of our devices?

Supporting 5,500 computers

We're  located about 12 miles west of Indianapolis, Indiana, and we have 13  instructional   buildings. We're a pre-K-to-12 institution and we have  approximately   8,700 students, nearing 10,000 end-users in total. We’re  currently   supporting about 5,500 computers in our district.

...  Currently  have  400 View desktop licenses. We’re seeing utilization of  that  license pool  of 20-25 percent right now, and the primary reason  that  we’re seeing  that utilization is because we’re really just  beginning  that phase, with  this being our first year for our virtual  desktop roll  out. We’re  really in the second year, but the first year  of more  widespread use.

We’re  training teachers on how to  adequately and  effectively use this  technology in their classroom with  kids It's been  very highly received  and is being adopted very well in  our classrooms,  because people are  seeing that we were able to  improve the computing  experience for them.

Lantz: With that many devices, getting out there and installing software, even  if it’s a push, locally, or what have you, there's a big management  overhead there. By using VMware View and having that in our data center,    where we can control that, the ability to have your golden image that    you can then push out to a number of devices has made it a lot easier   to  transition to this type of model.

We’re finding that we can   get  applications out quicker with more quality control, as far as   knowing  exactly what’s going to happen inside of the virtual machine (VM) when you run that application. So that’s been a big help.

A lot of our  applications are Web-based, Education City.  It’s a lot of  graphics and video. And we found that  we're still able  to run those in  our View environment and not have  issues.

Gardner: What are you  running in terms of servers? What is  your desktop  virtualization  platform, and what is it that allows you to  move on  this so far?

Lantz: On the server side, we're running VMware vSphere 4.1.  On the desktop side, we're running View 4.6.   Currently in our server  production, as we call it, we have three   servers. And we're adding a  fourth shortly. On the View side of things,   we currently have two  servers and we’re getting two more in the next   month or so. So we’ll  have a total of four.

Access from anywhere

Gardner: Now one of the nice things about the desktop virtualization and this    BYOD is it allows people to access these activities more freely    anywhere. How do you manage to take  what was once confined to the  school network and allow the  students and  other folks in your  community to do what they need to do,  regardless of  where they are,  regardless of the device?

Brames: We’re a  fairly affluent community. We have kids who were requesting to   bring in  their own devices. We felt as though encouraging that model   in our  district was something that would help students continue to use    computers that were familiar to them and help us realize some cost    savings long term.

So by connecting to virtual desktops in our    environment, they get a familiar resource while they're within our walls    in the school district, have access to all of their shared drives,    network drives, network applications, all of the typical resources that    are an expectation of sitting down in front of a school-owned piece of    equipment. And they're seeing the availability of all of those things   on  their own device.

... A typical   classroom for us contains  four student computing stations, as well as,   depending upon the  building size, three to five labs available. We’re   not focusing our  desktop virtualization on those labs. We’re focusing on   the classroom  computing stations right now. Potentially, we'll also be   in labs, as  we go into the future.

Then, in addition to those   student  computing stations, we’re seeing those applications where our    administrative team or principals and our district-level administrators    are able to begin using virtual desktops to access while they’re   outside  of the district and growing familiar with that, so that   whenever we  enter into that phase where we’re allowing our students to   access from  outside of our network, we have that support structure in   place.

... We’re also seeing an influx of more mobile-type devices such as tablets and even smartphones and things like that. The percentage of our users that are using    tablets and smartphones right now for powerful computing or their    primary devices is fairly low. However, we anticipate over time that the    variety of devices we’ll have connecting to our network because of    virtual desktops is going to increase.

Gardner: How is that hand-off  happening? Are you able to provide a unified experience  yet?

Lantz: That’s part of phase two of our approach that  we’re implementing  right  now. We’ve gotten it out into the classrooms to  get the students   familiar with it, so that they understand how to use  it. The next  step  in that process is to allow them to use this at home.

We    currently have administrators that are using it in this fashion. They    have tablets and are using the View client they connect in and get the    same experience if they're in school or out of school.

So we’re    to that point. Now that our administrators understand the benefits,  now   that our teachers have seen it in the classrooms, it’s a matter of    getting it out there to the community.

One of the other ways  that   we’re making it available is that at our public library, we have a  set   of machines that students can access as well, because as you  know, not   every student has access to high-speed Internet, but they  are able to  go  to library, check out these machines, and be able to  get into the   network that way. Those are some of the ways that we’re  trying to bridge   that gap.

Huge win-win

Technology Integration Group has resources that allow us to see what other school districts are    doing and what are some of the things that they’ve run into. Then, they    bring back here and we can discuss how we want to roll it out in our    environment. They’ve been very good at giving us ideas of what has    worked with other organizations and what hasn’t. That’s where they've    come in. They’ve really helped us understand how we can best use this in    our environment.

Gardner: I  often hear from   organizations, when they move to desktop  virtualization, that there are   some impacts on things like network or  storage that they didn’t fully   anticipate. How has that worked for  you? How has this roll out movement   towards increased desktop  virtualization impacted you in terms of what   you needed to do with  your overall infrastructure?

Lantz: Luckily for us we’ve had a lot of growth in the last two to three   years,  which has allowed us to get some newer equipment. So our network    infrastructure is very sound. We didn’t run into a lot of the issues    that commonly you would with network bandwidth and things like that.

On the storage side, we did increase our storage. We went with an EqualLogic box for that, but with View, it doesn’t take up a ton of storage  space   with link clones and things like that. So having seen a huge  impact   there, now as we get further into this, storage requirements  will get   greater, but currently that hasn’t been a big issue for us.

Gardner: On the flip-side of that, a lot of organizations I talk to, who moved    to desktop virtualization, gained some benefits on things like  backup,   disaster recovery, security, and control over data and assets,  and even   into compliance and regulatory issues. Has there been an  upside that  you  could point to in terms of being a more centralized  control of the   desktop content and assets?

Difficult to monitor

Lantz: When you start talking about students bringing in their own devices,    it's difficult to monitor what's on that personally owned device.

We   found that  by giving them a View desktop, we know what's in our   environment and we  know what that virtual machine has. That allows us   to have more secure  access for those students without compromising   what's on that student’s  machine, or what you may not know about what's   on that student’s  machine. That’s been a big benefit for us allowing   students to bring in  their own devices.

Gardner: Do we have any metrics of success either in business or, in this  case,   learning terms and/or IT cost savings? What has this done for  you? I   know it's a little early, but what's the early results?

Brames: You did mention that it is a little bit early, but we believe that as    we begin using virtual desktops more so in our environment, one of  the   major cost savings that we’re going to see as a result is  licensing  cost  for unique learning applications.

Typically in our district we would have purchased x    number of licenses for each one of our instructional buildings  because   they needed to utilize that with students in the classroom.  They may   have a certain number of students that need access to this  application,   for example, but they're not all accessing it during the  same time of   the day or it's on a machine that’s on a fat client, a  physical machine   somewhere in the building, and it's difficult for  students to have   access to it.

By creating these pools of  machines that have   specialty software on them we’re able to  significantly reduce the number   of titles we need to license for  certain learning applications or   certain applications that improve  efficiencies for teachers and for   students.

So that’s one area  in which we know we’re going to see   significant return on our  investment. We already talked about extending   the endpoints, and with  energy savings, I think we can prove some   results there as well.  Anything to add, Jason?

Lantz: One    of the ones that’s hard to calculate is, as you mentioned, maintenance    or management of this piece and technology, as we all know you’re  doing   more with less. This really gives you the ability to do that.  How you   measure that is sometimes difficult, but there are definitely  cost   savings there as well.

Gardner: I know budgets are really important in just about any school    environment. Do you have any   sense of the delta there between what it  would be if you stuck to   traditional cost structures, traditional  licensing, fat client, to get   to that one to one ratio, compared to  what you’re going to be able to do   over time with this virtualized  approach?

Brames: Our Advanced    Learning Center is the school building that has primarily senior    students and advanced placement students. There are about 600 students    that attend there.

Last year, 75 percent of those students were    using school-owned equipment and 25 percent of them were bringing  their   own laptops to school. This year, what we have seen is that 43  percent   of our students are beginning to bring their own devices to  connect to   our network and have access to network resources.

If  that trend   continues, which we think it will, we’ll be looking at  certainly over  50  percent next year, hopefully approaching 60-65  percent of our  students  bringing their own devices. When you consider  that that is  approximately  400 devices that the school district did  not need to  invest in, that’s a  significant saving for us.

Gardner: If you could do this over   again, a little bit of 20/20 hindsight,  what might you want to tell others   in terms of being prepared?

Lantz: One thing that’s   important is that when you explain this to users,  the words "virtual   desktop" can be a little confusing to teachers and  your end-users. What   I've done is taken the approach of it’s no  different than having a   regular machine and you can set it up to where  it looks exactly the   same.

No real difference

When    you start talking with end users about virtual, it gets into, okay,   "So  it’s running back here, but what problems am I going to encounter?"   and  those sort of things. Trying to get that end user to realize that   there  really isn’t a difference between a virtual desktop and a real   desktop  has been important for us for getting them on board and making   them  understand that it’s not going to be a huge change for them.

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Gardner: I'm interested why data management has been a primary driver for you as you've looked to adopt both the private cloud and VDI. What is it about the data equation that’s made this look like a good solution for you?

Fuss: We need our data to be accessible everywhere, at every time, no  matter   what provider is at what facility. Even from an engineering and    technology standpoint, no matter what system analyst, what network    engineer may sit down wherever they are to troubleshoot an issue, we need that common set of tools.

Common repository

We need the common repository of information for a caregiver. That would be the electronic medical information. It could be the x-rays, the slides, the CT scans,    or the results that were dictated by a radiologist. Whatever it might    be, that information needs to be available in a flexible manner and    delivered directly to the deskside experience.

Now, if that’s a desktop, it needs to be on a regular PC, but if we're talking about a tablet, we need to accommodate the tablets that people bring in and have come into the facility and are now actively being used, or zero client technology.

We    have all the different technologies and pieces. We're trying to   promote  these pieces to be used and trying to be flexible with   accommodating  them and getting people to the information that they need   so they can  take care of the first priority, which really is patient   care.

Gardner: Tell me about the extent of your  distributed campus and environment.   Not only are you dealing with many  different types of data and many   different endpoints, but you're also  distributing this across a   multitude of different environments.

Fuss: We have two main acute hospitals.   We have a nursing home, a cancer  center, outpatient care offices, and   several different offices all  around the community. So the data truly   needs to not be resident in  one spot.

Where    you're accessing that data from or where you're using it is  seamless    to the end user and provides a solid customer experience.

We also needed to have a secured disaster recovery (DR) facility, so that if anything were to happen to our primary data center that’s on one of the campuses, we could flex seamlessly over.

So    building a cloud for us made total sense. That cloud hovers between   one  of two data centers. One is at one of the acute facilities, and   then  100 miles away in another state, we have another data center. Our   cloud  roams between the two, and we have data flowing from each area.

So    the connection really is no longer about where it’s physically  located   by any restriction. It’s more of just gaining access to the  internet  and  being able to make connections. Where you're accessing  that data  from  or where you're using it is seamless to the end user  and provides a   solid customer experience.

... There are a lot of people who can embrace different types of clouds. You've got hybrid clouds,    private clouds, public clouds, all with different offerings. For us  it   made sense to do a private cloud. For others, it may make sense to  do   hybrid type cloud.

As we move toward the future, I can see  that   we might be able to offload some of our services toward the  public   cloud. As we increase the size of some of our data and we have  patient   care cut over to the side, there might be some other data that  does not   follow the same guidelines. We can put that into a secure  public cloud   and attach everything.

I'm    not worried about theft of an individual device, because the device     has nothing more on it than some connectors to get somewhere.

VMware is coming out with those tools and using those tools to make that  kind   of continuation project possible to look at. We're very excited  about   some of the initiatives that we've seen at VMworld -- the vCloud Director,    with security, the different layers built into that that could make    some of the public cloud usable for us for specific applications.

Gardner: Correct me if I am wrong, but it sounds as if private cloud to   you means better security.

Fuss: Oh, it does, most definitely. I'm no longer worried about the  endpoint   device walking away from us. I'm not worried about theft of  an   individual device, because the device has nothing more on it than  some   connectors to get somewhere.

When we were first embracing  zero   client technology in a lot of places, we did some studies. We  talked to   some different people who had already embraced it. One  particular   hospital I spoke to said they had on video someone stealing  a zero   client device, perhaps thinking that they had stolen some  great new   utility tool for home, a new PC. They were all excited.

They  also   have them on video, bringing it back the next morning, because  they   couldn’t do anything with it when they got to their house. Using  cloud,   using the technologies that ride in the cloud, like VMware View and access to the data through VMware View, really helps to lock things down and it helps to prevent things.

No data leakage

In the past, somebody could have taken a PC, and let’s say that PC could have had metadata on it or could have had some files on it that were saved in someway.   It  was comical to hear that story from another person who was in a   similar  situation as us, where there was no data loss or data leakage,   even if  that device had never come back. So the cloud really has   tightened  things down for us.

One of the primary concerns for our electronic medical records is that it’s patient data, financial data, and so needs to be PCI-, and HIPAA-compliant.    All the different compliance standards that we need to abide by are   all  satisfied with the ways that these machines are locked down, by the   way  the cloud is moving, and where we allow it to move to.

Gardner: How do you view private cloud and VDI  -- separate, distinct,  together? What’s the relationship?

Fuss: They're definitely together. They have to be together. In my opinion,    it’s what makes sense. We want to see the data tight. We want to see   the  integration tight. We can have a cloud where the data roams back   and  forth, but the connection into the cloud actually uses that data.

As    I sit here on a device, a personal device at the office that is    connected to my virtual desktop instance, this device doesn't even have    to be on my network. I'm utilizing a public network that we have here   at  the hospital system and I've connected into my virtual desktop. I   have  full accessibility. I'll flip over here in a few minutes when I go   into  another meeting. I'll bring my iPad with me, another personal device, and I'll be connected right to that same virtual desktop.

So    the cloud has allowed me, with View, to seamlessly move between all    these different devices. I no longer am tied to something. I'm no  longer   tied to a specific physical location, a physical anything. I  really am   completely mobile. I can work anywhere at any time and have  that same   common set of tools.

I    should no longer call it disaster recovery. I should call it our     second data center because even though it really is 100 miles away, I     can still sit there and work all day long just like I'm anywhere else.

It    doesn't matter if I'm working out of the DR site. I should no longer    call it disaster recovery. I should call it our second data center    because even though it really is 100 miles away, I can still sit there    and work all day long just like I'm anywhere else. That ability is    really the value that using a cloud and using View gives you.

I    want a physician in his office, out on the road or wherever they might    be, at home, in a practice have access to that same data and have a    similar look and feel every time they connect from whatever device.    That's what these solutions that we've opted for have provided for us.

...    We can already see the expansion, the use of that technology in    different areas. We have some physicians with iPads working throughout    the facility, visiting the patient’s bedsides, looking at their charts,    all that kind of flex room is great.

I've seen it in our    administrative areas, our human resource officer using iPad remotely.    We’ve had our Chief Information Officer using an iPad, using a PC at    home, and connecting through the View client to her machine.

We’ve    gotten support not just from forcing the technology out there, but by    people asking for the technology. That’s how you can tell you have a    good product. People asking, "Can I be moved to this new product,    because the flexibility of my supervisor, director, whoever is using is    what I need."

Hit a home run

If    the director calls saying, "I need this employee to have this    flexibility," you know you've hit a home run with the technology. I    haven’t had anybody call asking for another PC at another location for    the same person to work. I have people calling saying, "I really need  to   get them onto this technology as soon as it’s possible, because  it's   made this employee so efficient. I need to do that for everybody  else."

... Also, everything that we're doing   allows us not to  focus on location, and that's the big thing. We break   away from  location. So where is the data center? Is it going to be   affected by the next hurricane coming up the East Coast? Well, if we  have a fear of where the   hurricane is, we can move our data center 100  miles inland. Or if we   think that inland is going to be more affected,  we can keep it in Rhode   Island, which is right on the ocean.

So  we have that ability,   and nobody knows where that data is other than the  IT department. We   know it's within the system, within the security, but  nobody would ever   notice the difference or question where the data is  running or   residing. They might ask, and we could tell them, but nobody  says,   "Wow, that's slow" or "I can see a difference." None of those kind  of   calls comes in as the cloud flexes.

Gardner: At  VMworld, you've had a chance to look over View 5, and the  PC-over-IP benefits there; is that something that’s in your pipeline?

Fuss: Absolutely. We’re blessed to be in the VMware 5 beta test user group,    and we’re loving what we see. We like the performance. The PC-over-IP    expansion is amazing. They’ve written a great protocol there with  their   partners, and that is the technology that’s going to continue to  drive   the reinvention of the desktop.

We’ve gone through the    reinvention of the desktop a few times in my career, from somewhat dumb    terminals to smart terminals to client server. We seem to be making  our   way back to where we’re keeping our data safe in data centers and  in   silos. We’re giving people a great end-user experience to give them  a   full PC feature-set. We’re doing it all securely and we’re doing it  all   with products that integrate seamlessly with one another, and  that’s   really the goal.

We seem to be making our way back to where we’re keeping our data safe in data centers and in silos.

We    want the user to sit down and feel comfortable with whatever   technology  they use, and to have a way to take care of our patients   that need our  help and take care of what other important administrative   business they  may do, so we can keep moving forward.

...  So   the benefits are there, and they’re just growing now, as it's    integrated and being used more in the clinical areas. We’ve seen some    growth recently. Even our pharmacy staff is starting to carry iPads    around, when they’re doing inventories of some of the medication    machines and being able to get that information right there, but on a    device that’s secure. If they were to leave it behind, nobody could    connect to anything, and that data all sitting safe inside the data    center.

So the adoption is there, the benefits are already there,    and it's just growing and growing. Every time I turn around, we’re    bumping another 50, another 75, virtual machines, into another pool of machines for a new purpose, and that’s the expansion that I keep wanting to encourage.

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