HP Helps University of Utah Health Care Improve Patient Care and Lower Costs Through IT Consolidation

HP customer University of Utah Health Care is realizing patient care goals and holding flat staff increases through an IT consolidation project that helped improve its overall business technology.

With an HP BladeSystem IT Consolidation Solution in place, the center is cutting desktop support costs by 100 percent and achieving 11 times improvement in server team productivity.

According to an independent study released today by Thoughtware Worldwide, HP helped the university achieve a 346 percent return on investment, $4.8 million in savings and 146 percent internal rate of return over a three-year period.(1) At the same time, doctors now have up-to-date information about patients with a consolidation solution that leverages virtualization and HP software technologies.

“With HP’s help, we have succeeded in transforming the University of Utah Health Care’s technology infrastructure so that it is successfully driving the business of operating a teaching and research hospital,” said Jim Livingston, director, Data Resource Center, University of Utah Health Care. “HP’s IT Consolidation Solutions enabled us to meet our growth objectives, reduce costs, free up resources for innovation and, most importantly, meet our patient care goals.”

Consolidated IT technology provides enhanced performance and cost savings

University of Utah Health Care handles more than 900,000 outpatient visits and 23,000 inpatient admissions a year. Rapid growth and cutting-edge programs had put its data center, which housed more than 350 servers, under extreme stress. It had run out of space, power and cooling capacity. At the same time, the university was challenged to maintain IT alignment with its growth and medical goals.

Facing the possibility of a $7 million data center expansion, the hospital worked with HP on an IT approach that would make it possible to simultaneously reduce cost and enhance performance, allowing the university to focus on continued improvement of patient care. HP implemented an IT infrastructure that delivers better business outcomes, including:

• Increased value and lower hardware costs – With the help of HP Services, the university consolidated 150 database, application and Citrix physical servers onto 10 HP ProLiant BL20p and BL25p server blades with VMware infrastructure. This approach achieved a 15:1 server consolidation and a reduction of the server growth requirement by more than 90 percent.


• Room for growth and reduced power and cooling costs – Installation of the HP BladeSystem p-Class allowed virtualized servers to replace physical servers that had been running at less than 10 percent utilization. By reducing physical servers by 25 percent, the university was able to cut power and cooling consumption and free up space needed to accommodate growth within the confines of the existing data center.


• Staff savings -- Through the automation of tasks, the university was able to avoid a planned increase from 20 to 40 desktop support staff, resulting in a 100 percent staff cost savings.


• Protecting critical business information – Better insight into and control over the IT environment ensures that the university’s sensitive information is protected and delivered to the right people when they need it – in many cases, providing doctors with the most up-to-date medical records possible.


• Ensuring system availability for medical staff – HP Business Technology Optimization software, including HP Network Management Center and HP Operations Center, provides the university the needed insight and control over network and server functions, performance and availability, as well service-level objectives – providing 99.999 percent uptime of mission-critical applications on a 24x7 basis. Additionally, HP Systems Insight Manager helps the university’s IT staff monitor server systems, delivering real-time server utilization information as well as trending information on critical transactions and data server health for proactive monitoring and response.

University of Utah Health Care has transformed its IT environment to have a critical role in driving success for its overall business,” said Steve Fink, worldwide director, IT Consolidation Solutions, HP. “HP is extremely proud to have played a role in helping the university achieve a 346 percent return on investment and improved health care for its patients at the same time.”

HP offers a wide range of IT Consolidation Solutions that map to an organization’s specific business objectives and IT requirements, helping them to lower cost, accelerate business growth and reduce risk. Specific solution offerings include IT management consolidation, network consolidation, server consolidation, storage consolidation and workplace consolidation. Additional information about HP’s solutions for IT consolidation is available at www.hp.com/go/itconsolidation

About HP

HP focuses on simplifying technology experiences for all of its customers – from individual consumers to the largest businesses. With a portfolio that spans printing, personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure, HP is among the world’s largest IT companies, with revenue totaling $94.1 billion for the four fiscal quarters ended Jan. 31, 2007. More information about HP (NYSE: HPQ) is available at http://www.hp.com



(1) Thoughtware Worldwide, LLC, is a San Francisco-based firm specializing in investment decisions and value management. The complete University of Utah Health Care case study is available at www.thoughtwareworldwide.com/downloads/UUHSC_F.pdf