The IT systems at Huntsville Hospital weren't quite on their deathbed two years ago, but it was clear some radical intervention would be required. Virtualization has proved key in that intervention.

"We had old technology we knew had to be replaced. We had a high volume of desktops and servers that needed to be replaced. We had a data center that was out of floor space and power. We were down to less than 15 minutes of battery backup should we lose street power," says Huntsville Hospital VP and CIO Rick Corn.

High systems availability, backup and disaster recovery are vital to any business: some 63 percent of respondents to CIO's latest survey on enterprise virtualization efforts call disaster recovery one of their top three reasons to virtualize servers.

When your business entails people on stretchers, data availability, in the form of X-rays, CAT scans or electronic health records, can be a life or death matter.

But infrastructure at the hospital, whose Huntsville, Ala., campus supports 650 doctors, 2,000 nurses and 5,000 other employees, was so maxed out its three data centers had outgrown their own disaster recovery hardware and nearly outstripped the amount of power available from their existing connections, Corn says.

Having only 15 minutes of battery powered backup capacity meant that the campus couldn't come close to matching its own requirements for systems availability.

The hospital opted to remedy the situation with virtualization. In a three-month pilot program that ran from December 2006 to February 2007, Huntsville implemented IBM BladeCenter rack servers and VMware software to set up a scalable infrastructure that could cut costs both on the front end and the back end, for redundancy, failover and disaster recovery.

The pilot program proved so successful that the hospital decided to go full bore with its virtualization effort, primarily for server consolidation, at first.

As the larger implementation was planned, however, the IT staff realized that virtualization could improve the hospital's other major IT projects, including moving from paper to electronic health records, the rollout of thousands of new PCs and other devices to access those records, and the WiFi network to support them, says David Carlisle, IT manager of networks and services.

The server consolidation project expanded to include desktop virtualization and remote access, all in one package, he says.

"When we knew we were going to be putting out 2,000-plus devices, I started talking to the technical support team about the possibility of using virtualization technology for servers, and it evolved into a discussion of [using that same approach with] the desktop," Carlisle says.