IT infrastructure fills the bill: medical center switches to single directory approach to manage its network.

A little more than four years ago, Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore transitioned its computing environment, made up of three separate IT teams, into a centralized IT organization. Over time, Mercy's IT infrastructure evolved into a vast and growing PC network that provided access to various healthcare information systems and also the Internet, e-mail, several dozen client-based applications and many new Web-based clinical applications.

Mercy's IT staff realized integrating the disparate networks and applications from the three different IT teams would require careful planning. As the department considered its approach to integrating the environments, getting its arms around the vast and growing collection of personal computers and applications was a primary concern--250 applications in an environment that spans 200 servers and approximately 2,500 PCs and laptops.

Jim Stalder, CIO at Mercy, worked with his team to identify tools that would allow the staff to remotely manage the operating systems and applications across the entire network, regardless of location--and to do it in a way that would significantly reduce desktop visits.

Mercy Medical Center is a 130-year-old healthcare facility and teaching hospital. The Mercy Medical IT infrastructure spans a 235-bed community hospital, 35 physician practices in and around Baltimore, and a long-term care facility approximately 30 miles north of the city.

Mercy Medical's IT department supports some 3,500 employees scattered in and around Baltimore in its many locations. Furthermore, many computer users share a computer with multiple individuals, creating complexities in how applications and security issues are managed. An entire team of nurses, for example, may need periodic access to a single PC. Mercy Medical is no exception--the organization currently supports some 5,000 users via its 2,500 networked PCs.

The Mercy IT team has used a number of solutions to manage this disparate environment with increasing success. Initially, the IT priorities needed to cover the fundamental bases of stability and security. Mercy then worked toward increasing efficiency through creating a single configuration-management database built and centered around its help desk.

SINGLE DIRECTORY APPROACH

Originally, portions of Mercy's network were based on Novell NetWare Directory Service (NDS). Largely due to that foundation, Mercy's initial desktop deployment strategy included Novell ZENworks, coupled with other specifically chosen point solutions. At the outset, Stalder says, the approach was a reasonable strategy for eliminating the need to manually deploy and manage PCs. As the network grew and evolved, however, several issues made this strategy increasingly unworkable.

One of the challenges that emerged was that many of Mercy's software vendors only integrated with Microsoft's Active Directory (AD). As a result, Mercy had to maintain two directories (AD and NDS) to manage its various applications.

Tim Mooney, director of IT, notes, "As we looked at the ways we wanted to evolve, one of the first things we needed to decide was whether we wanted to maintain two directory structures or one. After careful consideration, we chose Active Directory."

Additionally, the IT team chose to move away from its early practice of linking best-of-breed management products together, and to look for an overall management suite. The desire to find a single integrated solution, combined with the need for a more comprehensive strategy for PC lifecycle management, led Mercy to select Altiris Client Management Suite (CMS).

The company's next step has been to maximize and increase the organization's abilities in managing its help desk. When Mooney and Giblin joined Mercy three years ago, the organization was handling help desk tickets through Remedy. The ultimate goal, however, was to integrate the inventory information into the ticket management system, which would have only been possible through fairly expensive third-party management tools, and once integrated, would have been costly and hard to maintain.

"We wanted to not only have the ability to enable a particular component centrally, but also to enable it from a help desk standpoint, and to have those functions fully correlate," Giblin says. "Trouble tickets, password problems--we wanted to get to a level where any of our contractors or users could easily and quickly open up a ticket from anywhere."

A SUITE OF SOLUTIONS

To accomplish that goal, Mercy added Altiris Inventory Solution and Altiris Helpdesk to its CMS implementation. Because all Altiris products emanate from a common underlying database, this combination enables Mercy to have a single, comprehensive configuration-management database to manage and track all of its assets.

The close integration of Inventory Solution, Helpdesk Solution and CMS is also critical to Mercy from a security standpoint. For example, Mercy's PCs are set to divert each machine to a screensaver and a screensaver lock every 15 minutes (a fairly typical standard in healthcare environments). Mercy can now ensure that every computer complies. In addition, the IT department can tighten or change the policy, as needed.

The most recent new element on Mercy's IT agenda is application virtualization. "We manage more than 200 applications in our environment," Stalder says. "Naturally, a number of them have conflicts, and those conflicts are the source of many of our incidents."

Mercy needed to take the additional step of stopping application problems before they occurred by using application virtualization for the deployment of current and new applications. Using Altiris' Software Virtualization Solution, the IT department packages the applications in virtual "spaces" that reside on the users' workstations and can be turned on or off as needed. This strategy eliminates dynamic link library conflicts, and prevents the application from leaving any kind of damage behind.

"The mere process of installing applications on the PCs as they're needed is a continual task," Stalder says. "We try to keep our image as consistent as possible, but invariably a user will call up and say 'I need Microsoft Project, right now.' In the past we'd have to walk the user through the installation over the phone, or install it over remote control, or send out a technician.

"Now, we can offer applications to our users when they need them and when they want them, without physically installing them on the PC. We can take them off as quickly as we put them on, and it's helping our workers to be infinitely more productive."

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