Cardiac unit resuscitated by paper after virtual PCs go dark

You couldn't miss the thin client terminal in the room. The wall mounted Wyse unit, extending out on a spring loaded, flexible steel arm, added a splash of color in the otherwise sterile examination room. So when the cardiologist entered toting a folder filled with patient data, I couldn't help but ask why he felt the need to have all of that paper on hand.

"Technically we're not supposed to have this," he admitted. The problem was, periodic upgrades to the back-end servers that powered the Citrix system had on more than one occasion bogged it down, causing delays delivering patient care. That was the reason why today it was taking so long to bring up the patient's list of medicines, he explained.

While some upgrade and change issues responsible for slowing down the Citrix environment were resolved simply by making adjustments in the software, other upgrades had overburdened the system hardware and could not be resolved until hardware was upgraded, causing additional delays.

Keeping the paper as a backup for some data also came in handy recently when an upgrade took the systems offline for an entire day. When that happened, the cardiac unit was the only one in the hospital that could continue without disruption. There was, he says, no other fallback plan.

Did the hosptial truly lack a business continuity plan, or was the cardiac unit just not aware of it? Does it matter? Without a well thought out and effectively communicated plan that everyone follows, the user's faith in technology will falter - and the customers will come up with their own workarounds, some of which may not be desirable in highly regulated businesses like health care.

The cardiologists' experience illustrates why IT must step up its game when it comes to expectations of uptime and performance for virtual PC infrastructure. When one computer fails people roll their eyes and move to another machine. When every machine is offline and no one can get at their email or other critical applications IT may face an insurrection. The back-end infrastructure that powers desktop virtualization needs to perform at the same level as other mission critical servers in the data center.

Unless IT adopts the best practices necessary to make that happen, users will start to treat virtual PC environments with the same disdain once reserved for time sharing systems of the '60s and '70s. And that could derail broader adoption of the technology in many large organizations.