CASE STUDY
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NOMAD HELPED RIVERSIDE HEALTH SYSTEM ACHIEVE 15-MINUTE UPGRADES Migration from Windows XP to Windows 7 was a daunting challenge for Riverside’s IT Department. Thanks to Nomad, the US healthcare firm was able to dramatically accelerate its Windows upgrade program – slashing the time taken to migrate a PC from three hours to just 15 minutes.
Challenge April 2014 was a significant date for US healthcare provider Riverside Health System: Microsoft had stopped providing support for Windows XP. Riverside was among the many companies who found themselves with an urgent need to switch from XP to Windows 7 – the only way to ensure protection against potential exploits and new vulnerabilities. With 7,800 PCs and a complex, highly dispersed server estate, Riverside faced a significant challenge in terms of rolling out the upgrade quickly and effectively. To ensure success, it needed an efficient, effective, and automated approach. Share this
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Solution 1E’s Nomad provided Riverside with a fast, bandwidth-efficient, and highly automated solution to roll-out Windows 7. The low-touch approach had minimum impact on end users and ensured that the small, centralized IT team could rapidly accelerate the migration.
Benefits • Accelerated migration - Nomad reduced the average time needed to migrate a PC to Windows 7 from three hours to just 15 minutes. Rather than migrating each machine individually, IT staff can set up 5-6 migrations at a time. • Painless process – Nomad made it possible for Riverside to carry out the migration without any impact on end users’ work – eliminating any costs that might have been associated with lost work time. • Increased time for key projects – Riverside has saved more than 24,000 man hours over the course of the migration project – time that can now be used on other important IT projects.
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Windows migration without the disruption Riverside Health System is a flagship regional US medical center with over 9,500 affiliates throughout the Virginia region, covering every aspect of healthcare. The organization’s IT infrastructure, which includes 7,800 PCs of varying configurations, is managed and supported by a small, centralized IT team of 25. With Microsoft about to terminate XP support, Riverside found itself exposed to an unacceptable degree of potential risk in terms of the security and functionality of its IT systems and data – factors which could also threaten the continuity of patient care. Riverside’s 7,800 PCs were spread across more than 100 locations, many of which had connection speeds of just 1.54Mbit/s. Combined with the central co-ordination of OS rollouts, software updates and patching across Riverside’s Wide Area Network (WAN), the process of migrating away from Windows XP posed a significant challenge. Riverside’s aim was to migrate its 7,800 XP machines to Windows 7 quickly – but the complexity of its IT infrastructure made this difficult. To get a feel for the scope of the project, Riverside’s IT Department set up a trial-run, using the traditional Windows User State Migration Tool (USMT). This took weeks, and ultimately proved impractical. A more efficient approach and toolset was required for the kind of low-impact migration Riverside wanted to achieve.
Migration that is automated, cost-efficient and fast Riverside needed a fast, bandwidth-efficient, and highly automated solution that would make migration to Windows 7 a painless process. After assessing a variety of different options and solutions, Riverside selected 1E’s Nomad Windows Software Deployment Tool. Once the roll-out began, buy-in from the rest of Riverside’s staff was simple, as upgrades impacted minimally on their work. Staff simply returned to their PCs to find a new OS installed cleanly. Just five months after implementation there were only 3,400 of 7,800 computers left to migrate. W.T. Guthrie, System Director, Riverside Health System, says: “Executive management’s buy-in focused around the costs. Labor to perform the migration would have been a one-time, throw-away cost and would have been repeated for every follow-on OS upgrade. “1E can be used not only for future migrations but for numerous other functions such as software reclamation, end-user software installation, software deployments, license management, ERP integration, and more. All of this repeatable functionality for about the cost of a one-time migration made choosing 1E an easy decision.”
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Benefits uncovered Using Nomad, Riverside was not only able to transform its approach to XP migration, but now has a tool in place that will deliver on-going efficiencies in the long term. Riverside has estimated that it will save around 23,400 man-hours during its next Windows rollout alone thanks to Nomad. Reducing the cost and time of a previously lengthy and laborintensive migration process means that Riverside’s IT staff can now focus on delivering more value to the business and end-users in other areas • Streamlined image delivery – Nomad allowed the Riverside IT team to quickly and automatically map the topology of the company’s WAN and subnets, treating a complex distributed network as simple and local. Rather than deliver a single image to each computer from a central point over the WAN, (a time-consuming and inefficient process), Riverside’s IT team could deliver just one copy to every branch, to be disseminated automatically via peer-topeer connections between the individual computers, using bandwidth throttling to remove the competition between IT and business traffic. • Distribution-point servers reduced by 95% – As well as being the most time, cost and bandwidth-efficient way to distribute OS upgrades, this approach reduced the number of distribution-point servers required to disseminate XP by 95% and reduced network complexity
“ We had struggled to migrate 20% of our PC landscape, but with the introduction of Nomad in 2014, the number of machines we could migrate each day shot up by 33%. Nomad delivered our ideal scenario - an automated, low-touch approach that delivered OS upgrades quickly while minimizing disruption allowing us to roll out machine-appropriate drivers automatically, and restore every user’s individual applications and settings without affecting their work.” Kenny Covington, System Analyst Riverside System • OS package delivery achieved in hours – By adopting Nomad, Riverside was able to ensure drastically more efficient use of the network and other resources to deliver a fast migration. Following deployment, Riverside noticed an immediate difference in terms of bandwidth availability; delivery of OS packages to individual locations that previously took 4-6 days were delivered in 3-4 hours.
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“ The average time to migrate a PC to a new operating system has been reduced from around three hours to 15 minutes, an improvement of 91%. The approach also saved man hours, as rather than painstakingly migrating each machine individually, IT staff could set up five to six migrations and walk away, leaving the highly-automated system to manage itself.” Chris Stephens, System Analyst, Riverside Health System
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