Reference story - Máxima Medical Center
Máxima Medisch Centrum (MMC), an 865-bed hospital in the Netherlands, was created through the merger of the Saint Joseph Hospital in Veldhoven and the Diaconessenhuis in Eindhoven. The hospital employs 3,500 people and provides a total package of basic healthcare services in the region Eindhoven-Kempenland, with specializations in neonatal intensive care and dialysis.
The Challenge
The merger of the Saint Joseph Hospital and the Diaconessenhuis enabled the organization to build a complete new IT architecture and centralize many applications including the new business-critical Electronic Healthcare Information System (E-ZIS), which contains patient records. MMC has a large number of applications because many small groups within the hospital use their own specialized applications. “The ultimate goal is to run 80 percent of all applications centralized on Citrix Presentation Server,” said Hans Smulders, Senior Systems Engineer at Máxima Medisch Centrum. “In addition, we prefer thin clients wherever possible. Because this goal is difficult to reach for our physicians that need graphical intensive applications, we needed an additional solution.
We were also looking for a reporting solution that could give detailed information about all applications used, to help us in managing the ongoing standardization process.” The new infrastructure needed to be easy to manage, “We always had a stable environment, but is was built and maintained using many login and configuration scripts and policies. To maintain these scripts, we needed extensive scripting experience within our IT department. We were searching for tools to simplify the complex scripting environment,” added Smulders.
Main benefits
- Increased effi ciency of IT management and administration
- Eliminated the need for writing and maintaining scripts
- Reduced lead-time for IT changes
- Enabled scheduled automated system administration tasks
- Improved availability of IT services
The Solution
Cam IT Solutions bv, a Systems Integrator with 20 years history proposed and designed - together with the IT department of MMC - a solution based on Citrix Presentation Server and RES PowerFuse. Today many business critical applications run on the centralized Citrix Presentation Servers, with a locked down environment using RES PowerFuse, the user workspace management solution from RES Software. MMC has over 2.000 desktops that include fat clients, medium clients and thin clients. The Windows XP-based fat clients are mostly used by physicians and run local applications and centralized applications on Citrix Presentation Servers. The medium clients and thin clients automatically start a desktop session on the Presentation Server. The fat and medium clients are provided with RES Subscriber (a component of RES PowerFuse) that works in tandem with RES PowerFuse on the server. RES Subscriber works transparently for the user and starts local applications and applications on Citrix
Presentation Server.
“Cam IT Solutions is our preferred partner that advices us for our existing and future infrastructure and supports us with additional knowledge,” continued Smulders. “Recently Cam IT Solutions advised us to take a look at another product from RES Software called RES Wisdom, a tool for automation of software installation on our Citrix Presentation Servers, Windows XP clients and Windows servers. It took only a few weeks to make the decision to switch to RES Wisdom. RES Wisdom was very easy to implement in our infrastructure and was even easier to use. It took about one hour to get started.” Now all systems run the RES Wisdom agent to automate many change and reporting tasks. The combination of both RES PowerFuse and RES Wisdom eliminates the need for custom made scripts and automates many IT administration tasks. It perfectly complements other technologies in use by MMC, like Citrix Presentation Server, Microsoft’s Remote Installation Services and Microsoft Application Virtualization (SoftGrid).”
The Benefits
Smulders: “Previously, we had two employees with the experience required to write and maintain scripts. With the RES Software solutions, almost every IT employee can manage the Microsoft Windows environment as there is no scripting knowledge required. The advantages are enormous: we are no longer dependant on a small and selected group of employees that can maintain the environment. For example, when a department today requests an application with special requirements like the blocking of access to USB drives, anyone can implement these changes immediately because RES PowerFuse and RES Wisdom are very easy to use with a central graphical management console. Another advantage of using RES Software solutions is that the lead-time for changes has drastically been reduced which increases the service level to our employees including nurses and doctors. Using RES Wisdom MMC now also schedules many remote system administration tasks like automatic defragmentation of systems or scanning and cleaning profiles.“
“Thanks to the RES Software solutions, the maintenance window for administration of servers and desktops is much shorter than ever before, which improves the general availability of IT services. We instantly know differences between systems and can update them automatically,” concluded Smulders. “In a Citrix environment it is extremely important that servers in a farm are identical. With RES Wisdom it takes a snap with the fingers to realize this, resulting in a stable infrastructure. Instead of sequential installations, they now run in parallel and it takes about one minute to initiate the process. RES Wisdom has the right functionality, at a reasonable price and is very easy to use compared to alternatives.”
The advantage of using RES Software solutions is that the lead-time for changes has drastically been reduced which increases the service level to our employees including nurses and doctors.
Hans Smulders, Senior Systems Engineer, Netherlands