USF Health System Improves Clinician and IT Productivity

Unidesk Corporation annnounced that USF Health System is using technology from Pure Storage, Inc. and Unidesk to power infrastructure that improves patient care through increased clinician and IT productivity.

With its new VDI leveraging Pure Storage FlashArray, all-in-one VDI management software from Unidesk and server and desktop virtualization software from VMware, USF Health is giving its clinicians and staff faster, more secure access to key healthcare applications, while reducing IT maintenance and expenses.

USF Health is a partnership between the Doctors of USF Health and the University of South Florida Morsani College Of Medicine, the College of Nursing, the College of Public Health, the College of Pharmacy, the School of Biomedical Sciences, and the School of Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation Sciences. The Tampa-based healthcare organization is dedicated to making life better through an integrated approach that combines research, education, and healthcare. USF Health is relying on Pure Storage and Unidesk to meet the demanding desktop requirements of the healthcare industry, allowing for constant reconfiguration, reliable uptime and I/O performance, quick delivery of any application, and a persistent experience that saves all clinician and staff customizations.

“In healthcare, desktops have to perform well and they have to be constantly configured and updated with many different applications,” said Richard Savage, systems administrator, USF Health. “Pure Storage and Unidesk have enabled us to successfully deploy VDI, increasing our speed, agility, and efficiency. What used to take eight hours to backup a store of electronic medical records, now takes two. What used to take several hours to package and deliver applications and Windows patches, now takes minutes. We now have the right infrastructure in place to increase clinical and IT productivity and enhance patient care.“

USF Health selected Pure Storage’s all-flash storage array for its inline deduplication technology and ability to deliver storage performance, scalability, and data security. A single FlashArray can power USF Health’s 500 virtual desktops provisioned by Unidesk, enabling the health organization to experience nearly 11:1 reduction of data and latency of less than 1ms. USF Health selected Unidesk and its patented Composite Virtualization layering technology to simplify Windows image management and application delivery. Unidesk enables every desktop VM to be created and patched from a single, shared Windows OS layer and any combination of shared application layers for enhanced speed and agility. Together with the combined storage efficiency of Pure Storage and Unidesk, USF Health is able to support its variety of healthcare, research, and education use cases with a lean IT staff.

“Persistent VMs are where Pure Storage and Unidesk really shine for us,” continued Savage. “We tried non-persistent desktops at first, but our users would lose their personalization every time we recomposed our VMware Horizon View pools, and the number of images we needed offset our storage savings. Now, I can give clinicians, staff, and in-house developers a truly persistent VM with only one Windows and set of application images to manage, and let Pure Storage de-dupe and Unidesk layering save all the space.“

“The move to digitize healthcare has totally transformed how hospitals and providers need to invest in their IT infrastructure. By bringing patient care and medical records online and instrumenting diagnostic equipment to be digital-first, healthcare institutions have found themselves running some of the most sophisticated data centers in the IT industry, all while navigating challenging regulatory and customer data privacy expectations,” said Matt Kixmoeller, VP products, Pure Storage. “Flash storage is a tool to help hospitals deliver the very best patient experience, while helping healthcare providers reduce the cost of care by making doctors and clinicians more productive. Pure Storage has enabled healthcare providers to leverage flash broadly across their environments by bringing the cost of all-flash storage inline or below traditional disk solutions. Pure Storage is not only proud to be eliminating USF Health’s storage headaches, we’re helping to enable competitive advantage so their clinicians and staff can focus on doing what they do best: delivering the highest quality care.“

“The amount of IT time and effort that healthcare organizations spend trying to keep Windows, Electronic Health Record software and other applications current is massive, especially since they often need to be patched and upgraded once a month,” said Tom Rose, CMO, Unidesk. “The time spent on this is time not spent enhancing patient care or complying with high security and privacy standards. Unidesk is pleased to be the platform that makes image management and application delivery so much simpler for USF Health’s lean IT staff, and gets virtual desktops and applications into the hands of those who are making life better for USF Health patients.”

Video on USF Health and  its virtual desktop initiative