Helping more people on their road to recovery? I’m ready.

By Whit Baker

When people struggling with drug and alcohol addiction come to The Watershed Addiction Treatment Programs, they’re in physical and emotional pain. They need help. And that’s what our 600 staff members, from physicians to paramedics, give them every day.

But we had a problem—when patients sat down to work with employees, the information transferred slowly because of our aging IT infrastructure. That’s unacceptable because every millisecond counts when our patients’ lives are at stake.

However, other internal projects were keeping our three administrators constantly busy, which made it hard to focus on the slowdown issue. We decided that a desktop virtualization solution would be the best option, but we had a very limited budget–we didn’t know how we could easily afford new technologies.

Accessing patient information in six seconds, with help from a Dell private cloud

We decided to work with Dell—an organization we’ve always received great technology and support from—to create a new private cloud based on Dell servers,  storage and networking technologies. The cloud is powered by eight Dell PowerEdge R920 rack servers with the Intel® Xeon® processor E7 family, a hybrid flash storage solution based on Dell Compellent SC8000 controllers and Compellent SC220 enclosures, and powerful Dell Networking N3048 and N4032 switches. Dell also helped us deploy Dell Wyse thin clients to deliver virtualized desktops to all our employees.

Thanks to Dell Financial Services, our budget concerns didn’t limit us in our implementation. We were able to finance our entire solution, which helped us better manage our cash flow by spreading our payments over five years.

This new cloud has dramatically improved our network performance, so we can stream critical applications more than twice as fast, and our healthcare professionals can get onto the network and into patient files in six seconds. Now, instead of waiting to get into clinical applications, nurses and physicians can treat patients faster. That means they are better equipped to save patients’ lives, which is what Watershed is all about.

Getting ready to grow

We have much better IT management capabilities with the Dell solution, and that will help us meet our organization’s growth plans. That’s important because Watershed is soon going to be expanding. When we do, all we have to do is create new accounts instead of spending a lot of time setting up new servers.

We have a lot of confidence now in our ability to grow and add new treatment programs in new cities. We are definitely ready for the future by working with Dell, and we’re excited about the possibility of helping even more people on their road to recovery.

View the case study at http://dell.to/1GNFtrp

Intel Inside®. Powerful Solution Outside.

About the Author: Power More