Emanuel Medical Center

“Tackling the virtualization project wasn’t easy. There is a lot of information out there and much of it is contradictory. In working with DSA, they provided us with a lot of general guidance, helped us understand the pros and cons of different approaches, and got us on the right path.”

-Ken Hoach Technical Service Manager, Emanuel Medical

Emanuel is a not-for-profit, community-based Christian health care organization owned by the Evangelical Covenant Church. The main campus on Delbon Avenue in Turlock includes a 209-bed acute care hospital, a 145-bed skilled nursing facility and a 49-bed assisted living facility. Their facilities also include the nearby Emanuel Medical Plaza the home of Emanuel Regional Cancer Services, the Stanford Emanuel Radiation Oncology Center, the Ruby E. Bergman Women’s Center and other providers.

In 2009, Emanuel was managing several IT initiatives. Some of these included new facility space, upgrades to their network cabling throughout the campus, upgrades to several of the application systems, and a migration to a new email system. With all these projects underway, Emanuel IT management was tasked with saving dollars in the data center. Where could they cut costs without impacting the reliability and performance of the application systems whose data was growing 70% per year?

Emanuel turned to DSA Technologies to help form a plan of action. IT management needed to understand what options were available, what the impact of their growth rates be on a new architecture, and how they could remain HIPAA compliant.

In a short period of time, DSA Technologies had worked with the Emanuel staff to complete a full analysis of the existing application, storage, network, and server environments.

The analysis showed that Emanuel would clearly benefit from virtualizing much of their infrastructure. The major question remained, how should the system be built to guarantee 24/7 continuous operation, especially for specific medical applications that hadn’t previously been virtualized?

DSA staff along with Emanuel IT management identified the key criteria that would allow the project to be successful. A plan was then developed and executed, leading the way for Emanuel to meet the conflicting requirements to provide additional services without interrupting availability or expanding the budget.