VCU SCHOOL OF DENTISTRY
The VCU School of Dentistry infrastructure team manages over 25 virtual servers that support the administrative , clinical , instructional , and research operations at the school . Like all hardware , it eventually reaches the end of its useful life .
“ Since we had already identified what systems needed to remain on-premise , we needed to scope out an appropriate infrastructure environment that could be optimised for our unique needs , especially our EHR system , which runs on an Oracle database backend , and our picture archiving communication system ( PACS ) that expands daily ,” said Talley .
IPDS helped provide a solution that could grow with the school over the next five years . “ They were great partners helping us in evaluating and analysing our environment and assisting us with procuring and configuring the new equipment ,” said Canaday .
Another move proved invaluable as the school and rest of the world grappled with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic . The team had made it a priority to increase their usage and attention to virtualisation in 2020 .
“ VCU was one of the first dental schools to go paperless . We started exploring virtual desktop infrastructure technology for clinical purposes over a decade ago , and we were one of the first to leverage this technology ,” said Talley . “ This and remote access enable the unification of workflow across our clinical operations to enhance the employee and student experience .”
During the pandemic , the team replaced everything in the clinical operatories with Wyse thin clients that connect to Citrix infrastructure managed by our University , to improve the delivery of the clinical desktop experience to our students , providers , and support staff . The strategy has served them well over the last three years ; however , they recently upgraded the backend environment with the help of IPDS . The new solution still uses Wyse thin clients , but it runs on Dell VxRail Hyper Converged Infrastructure while leveraging Citrix cloud services .
“ Ultimately , this means every VCU School of Dentistry student has a consistent , reliable desktop environment when they go into the clinic , and they can also connect after normal business hours remotely using the laptops provided through our student laptop initiative ,” said Canaday . “ Since we are leveraging VDI , we can be platform agnostic , and so , for the first time , we ’ ve switched to Macbook Airs from DELL XPS devices for our students .”
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