CGH Medical Center Leverages Virtual Instruments

Virtual Instruments, Inc., in infrastructure performance management (IPM) for computing environments, announced that CGH Medical Center, an Illinois-based progressive acute care facility, has deployed the VirtualWisdom4 IPM platform to guarantee performance and availability of its IT infrastructure.

The platform provides CGH Medical Center with 360-degree end-to-end visibility of its virtualized data center infrastructure to keep the hospital’s critical systems running 24/7 in support of its patient care initiatives.

CGH employs more than 1,400 people, including 140 physicians across 35 areas of medicine. It relies on a diverse application portfolio that includes electronic medical records, billing, lab, radiology and several other mission-critical systems. These interdependent systems must operate together without fail for CGH to deliver on its mission to provide excellent patient care through outstanding skill and heartfelt passion. By understanding the application workload-to-infrastructure alignment, CGH is able to make better decisions, from the IT operator to the COB.

Randy Davis, CIO and VP of support services, CGH Medical Center, said: “I don’t understand how any IT environment can function without a solution like VirtualWisdom. We have a maze of connectivity – highly virtualized across all tiers – that inherently makes it difficult to see what’s going on. VirtualWisdom gives us the answers to diagnose problems, drive utilization and satisfy the requirements of both our users and our board.“

Before integrating IPM, CGH’s IT team had challenges not uncommon to many throughout IT-continually ensuring optimal performance and availability in its virtualized environment and identifying root causes of latency issues and intermittent performance degradations. Within an hour of having VirtualWisdom4 running, CGH was able to look into its environment and monitor its infrastructure, enabling the organization to determine what, how, when and where emergent problems that impact performance were occurring. Once the platform was deployed, the team continued to benefit from the accurate, unbiased answers it received. This empowered the team to have more informed and collaborative dialogs internally and externally with CGH’s vendor ecosystem.

VirtualWisdom4 gives users visibility into IT infrastructure to foster the kind of understanding of IT operations required in highly virtualized landscape. Proactive monitoring of critical workloads minimizes inefficiency and helps administrators save time, money and resources. Performance management and cost optimization are vital components of healthcare IT, and VirtualWisdom helps organizations, such as CGH Medical Center, achieve both.

“Given the healthcare industry’s ongoing reliance on IT to enable meaningful outcomes, now more than ever, providers like CGH must optimize their IT infrastructures to guarantee availability and performance while also managing and accurately forecasting spend,” said John Gentry, VP marketing and alliances, Virtual Instruments. “Like many other companies, hospitals depend on virtualization, specialized services and interdependent systems to deliver excellent QoS. Anything that impacts performance or availability is unacceptable. And in healthcare organizations, unacceptable may be life-impacting. VirtualWisdom enables the CGH IT team to deliver optimal performance so the hospital can ensure meaningful outcomes.“

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