The Oasis hospital is implementing a virtualized infrastructure.

Al Ain’s Oasis Hospital in the United Arab Emirates has begun deployment of a virtualised infrastructure as part of a new planning system of resources by the company Maidis.

The hospital will have about 40 virtual machines spread over 20 of physical servers, followed by deployment of smart clients.  

By the Imthishan Giado Thursday, June 11, 2009
Original document:  http://www.itp.net/news/558048-oasis-hospital-plants-flag-for-uae-with-first-virtualised-healthcare-servers?ln=en#continueArticle
 
The hospital is currently installing a set of fully virtualized Dell servers, and in a second phase the smart client Sun Microsystems.
Luis Perfetti, Director of the Information System in the Oasis hospital and his team are happy with the change: "We just got delivery from Dell for all the rackable servers - so they're not just blades. The storage is coming from EMC. We'll have about 20 physical servers for this project including the blades and will run about 40 virtual machines on top of the 20 physical servers."

The hospital staff claims that when the deployment is complete, it will be the first fully virtualised environment for a healthcare provider in the Middle East. Mr Perfetti claims that most hospitals have, to date, tried virutalisation only in a piece-meal fashion, leaving the true innovation to other verticals like banking and finance. This, he says, also leaves the healthcare industry with the problem of not knowing where to turn to for implementation advice when problems occur.

"Other banks and organizations use virtualised environments. In terms of virtualization itself, there is expertise [available], but it is a real challenge." He explains. For this project, the Oasis hospital has hired consultants specialized in VMware virtualisation, in addition to the Maidis’s French team, who are used to working with virtualisation in their native country.

"We will also include smart clients, we have an agreement to use the SUN RAYS. This is not confirmed yet. We [also] take into account the evaluation of equipment Wyse. The implementation of Sun Ray is the one we have evaluated in our proof-of-concept, and we know that it works with the system we need. "He adds.
Smart clients can be particularly useful in the medical sector, where doctors and nurses move frequently between jobs.

"The idea is that they carry a smart card to put into the system and identify themselves simply by the SSO." If they have to move, they can pull it off, go to another place and plug it in and they still have their session. It is easier because they do not have to connect and waste time. Doctors complain they have so little time to see patients, which is true, of course. Anything we can do to make it faster is the key for us, "he says.

The Oasis hospital’s ERP and infrastructure implementation are expected from the second quarter of 2010.