Prairie North Health region steps on virtual pastures

SAN FRANCISCO, US: Prairie North Health Region (PNHR), a regional health authority located in Saskatchewan, Canada, providing health services to over 74,000 citizens was facing expanded geographical support remit, legacy IT systems and severe bandwidth constraints.

Now PNHR has chosen WAN optimization devices to increase network capacity, accelerate virtualized desktop applications and deliver quality of service to ensure LAN-like performance for remote users.

Expand Networks, a player in optimizing WANs for branch office consolidation and virtualization, has a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) project win with PNHR.

Having been tasked with delivering IT services for Keewatin Yatthé Health Region (KYHR), PNHR decided to centralize IT Datacentre services and deploy a VDI solution due to the large geographical expanse and remote locations in KYHR. Located in Northwest Saskatchewan, KYHR administers a comprehensive and much needed health care delivery system for numerous northern villages and towns, a press note tells. Dwayne Lessner, manager of IT operations at PNHR explains the challenges the project presented and the reasons for choosing the Expand solution:

“Due to the KYHR remote geography and limited IT resources available we decided on a desktop virtualization project in order to simplify IT support, deployment and management processes. However, we soon realized that bandwidth availability was a major hurdle with KYHR’s regional and medical staff having only access to T1 links resulting in WAN oversubscription and bandwidth contention. Upgrading these T1 links was not an option as bandwidth simply wasn’t available due to the remoteness of these northern locations. To compound this even further we had the impact of the increased pay load due to the VDI protocols serving the virtual desktops. We needed a solution that could both increase the capacity of the network and be able to accelerate the virtualized applications to the remote desktops.”