How open virtualization can make a difference in people's lives

Recently a group of Red Hat product managers were discussing the uniqueness of our products. In this case Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Virtualization, and that when combined together into a ‘platform’ how they deliver unique opportunities and value for our customers which in turn allows them to further innovate in ways that can drive their businesses to a greater good.

An example of this is recent work done by Intermountain Healthcare. Intermountain Healthcare drove investments with Red Hat in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Virtualization as well as CloudForms and Ansible. Combined, these Red Hat offerings when integrated into Intermountain’s day-to-day business processes resulted in increased service delivery levels—important in the healthcare world.

As Brett Lawson, Intermountain’s Director of Infrastructure & Operations says, "What I do matters. I can make a difference in people's lives." Let's drill down on Intermountain Healthcare, their needs, and outcomes:

Intermountain Healthcare is a not-for-profit health system that includes hospitals, clinics, and health insurance plans in the intermountain west area of the United States. They needed to optimize and automate their IT infrastructure to reduce costs and better collaborate to quickly create and launch innovative patient services.

Challenge: Support innovative patient care

Intermountain Healthcare's legacy IT environment made making changes a complex process, and provisioning delays hindered development work. Additionally, mainframe hardware and proprietary software added licensing and other IT costs.

The group sought a more agile, flexible solution that would simplify its IT environment, and ultimately improve costs for end customers. Lawson said, "The community sees Intermountain as a partner, someone they rely on for the best healthcare at an appropriate cost."

Solution: Migrate to open source solutions

Intermountain turned to Red Hat, its long-time, trusted technology partner, for help designing and deploying a new environment using open source virtualization and management solutions.

"When we did a proof of concept against proprietary solutions, we found Red Hat CloudForms to be a lot more flexible," said Paul Strader, Supervisor of Open System Engineering at Intermountain. "In fact, we gained the same functionality as our existing proprietary software, which took a year to get running properly, in just three weeks."

Intermountain also used Red Hat Openshift container platform and Red Hat Fuse to streamline its patient portal and simplify its messaging interfaces. Intermountain uses Ansible Automation—including Red Hat Ansible Tower and Red Hat Ansible engine—to configure and manage their OpenShift and Linux environments. To support this software, the group switched to cost-effective Intel-based processors.

Intermountain has now migrated a third of its IT infrastructure to Red Hat Virtualization, provisioned and managed with Red Hat CloudForms. In addition, several components of the company’s MyHealth patient app—a solution that offers access to lab results and medical records—have been migrated to OpenShift, with others planned for future migration.

Results: Build agile, cost-effective IT—for patient savings

With agile, easy-to-use technology from Red Hat, Intermountain's teams can provision their own virtual machines (VMs), and container technology has reduced the need for time-consuming custom deployments.

As a result, deployment time has decreased from two to three weeks to about four hours, and VM provisioning time has improved from three days to just 20 minutes. By migrating to open source software, Intermountain has significantly reduced its IT costs—including licensing and staffing costs. Lawson again notes, "our Intel and Red Hat solution has helped us reduce costs while still getting the availability, power, and performance that's required in a clinical environment." In addition, Intermountain's new, flexible environment supports collaborative DevOps work.

To learn more about Intermountain Healthcare and their experiences in achieving more success and delivering good, see their success story at RedHat.com/intermountain.