Containing the Storm:How Superior Performance

Management Multiplies VDI Value

2Xangati White Paper

I f you are a healthcare professional, then you and your organization are caught between the horns of compliance and improving the patient experience. With the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) now in full effect, the days of lax enforcement are over.

First-time penalties for violations can reach up to $250,000. The transition to EMR/EHR use, along with all of the systems and equipment upgrading that entails, will be done and done well — or else. Penalties can also extend to your organization’s business associates.

While jumping through regulatory hoops, providers still need to deliver superior care to patients. That means more accurate diagnoses, more time per patient visits, improved access to information, and other quality of experience services either directly or indirectly tied to a smoothly operating IT infrastructure.

And, of course, all of this should be happening while still elevating the provider’s bottom line.

Fortunately, two infrastructure updates make all of the above possible: migration to the cloud and systems virtualization. Depending on the specifics, these improvements may intersect, or they may deeply overlap. No matter what, their benefits are irrefutable. Cloud-based services can improve lab order entry, pharmacy records management, medical billing, imaging service requests, and more.

In fact, from better ability to execute telehealth initiatives to consolidation of back-end servers and energy savings, these technologies pay massive dividends for those who plan their deployment carefully and maintain them for maximum effectiveness. One of the best ways to tackle this dual need is through a well-managed virtual desktop platform.

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The Value of VDI

Cloud-based applications can help to centralize services and extend their reach, but using most of these services still requires some sort of terminal with a mouse, keyboard and display. Traditionally, this meant using a desktop-type PC running full copies of Windows, any required applications, and possibly some unnecessary (and often risky) applications. The biggest issue with this client-side application model is total cost of ownership (TCO). A fully configured desktop PC, in order to run applications locally, must support a higher class of hardware than a “thin client” system that does little more than relay signals from a remote server. Higher-end hardware components naturally cost more, and the cost of setting up and maintaining those “thick” systems tends to be higher. Even when repurposing old PCs for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), a TCO comparison still shows thick options costing roughly double their thin alternatives.

In reality, while users may not have as much control over applications and customization, VDI is by nature more secure than localized data access for multiple reasons, including higher control over the OS’s environment and superior safeguarding of data when at rest. Additionally, when the hosting solution is regulation-compliant, the centralization of that service passes through multiple compliances to the user organization by proxy. VDI can also make audits easier, especially if the underlying performance metrics are tracked, recorded and stored. Without predictive performance management, VDI environments can suffer from indeterminate performance issues negating the benefits of VDI. In order to achieve complete service assurance, VI users must be able to comprehensively track and analyze -- end-to-end -- all key infrastructure components that affect VDI end-user experience.

Prescriptive Analytics: Actions are prescribed for IT personnel to keep operations running smoothly

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As for the operational benefits of VDI, take Canadian healthcare outfit Sunrise Health Region as an example. The provider’s IT group described to CIO Insight its mix of Dell Wyse thin clients, HP servers, VMware virtual platform, and Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp software for supplying a VDI environment to over 3,500 users spread across thousands of miles. While serving such a broad geography has its own obvious advantages, the deployment’s real payoff came with the revelation that clinic workers would spend roughly 150 minutes per shift waiting to log into various systems scattered around their buildings. That time dropped to a mere five minutes per shift thanks to VDI infrastructure. Over two hours per worker per shift could be returned to patient care, which is an impressive way of measuring service assurance.

For these reasons and many others, healthcare organizations are flocking to VDI. IT security firm Imprivata expects VDI adoption within healthcare to reach 65 percentage by 2016, up from only 33 percentage on 2014. Imprivata’s “2014 Desktop Virtualization Trends in Healthcare Report” illustrates not only the benefits of VDI (especially when accompanied by single sign-on technology) but also how “zero clients” (thin systems with absolutely no local storage) and handheld devices are now rising in popularity as VDI endpoints.

This proliferation of device types puts more pressure back on IT. Clearly, clinicians benefit from having data wherever and whenever they need, but they must have this convenience without sacrificing compliance. One only needs to recall the early 2015 hack of giant health insurer Anthem, in which up to 80 million user records may have been compromised, to understand the criticality of proper network security and management. So while virtualized infrastructure does streamline data operations in many regards, the technology still bears its own complexities and issues. Fortunately, a new class of tools exists to help manage the largest of these pain points.

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COST AND CONTENTION

Conventional wisdom held that traditional server CPU utilization tended to hover around 10 percent, meaning that companies were vastly overpaying for unused compute resources, environmental cooling, and total power consumption. The timing was good, then, for virtualization to emerge, which allowed for multiple virtual servers to occupy one physical server and thus use its resources at more optimized, cost-effective levels.

Only that often didn’t happen, at least not in regular practice. Despite having the ability to more efficiently load servers, even the savviest enterprises still resist doing so. A 2011 Accenture study showed how a cross-section of 20 Amazon EC2 cloud servers averaged only 7.3 percent utilization throughout an entire week. As the chart below illustrates, even usage spikes failed to exceed one-third of total capacity.

The same study notes how 10 servers at GoGrid averaged only 3.2 percent utilization. A 2008 McKinsey study of 458 data center servers found average utilization reached a mere six percent and “up to 30 percent of installed servers are potentially dead,” meaning that they carry no significant traffic and only waste energy and money. Four years later and well into the virtualization era, presenters at the Uptime Institute Symposium 2012 noted how the average CPU utilization for all servers is typically pegged at 20 to 30 percent, but they believe that actual utilization is fewer than two percent.

Even if such numbers are off by a multiple of 2x, 3x or even 5x, there’s no mistaking that resource underutilization deserves greater inspection. Why? Because contention storms are the bane of virtualized services. They can render patient image files all but inaccessible and cause surgical assistants in the midst of a critical operation to wait 10 seconds for a refresh after every link click. Whether spawned from seasonal traffic surges, random industry news, time of day, freak chance, or all of the above, sudden surges in resource utilization will and do happen, especially on servers hosting higher numbers of virtual machines.

The time to take action is before the storm hits, and this is the key problem for virtualized environments. The overwhelming majority of monitoring tools only check prevailing network conditions every 5-15 minutes on an averaged-out basis. As anyone who has been in a sandstorm or flash flood will testify, a lot can change in 15 minutes. Moreover, once the storm has been identified, IT must discover root cause in order to begin remediation. As ZK Research and Xangati found in their joint “2012 Cloud and Virtualization Survey,” only 21 percent of storm root causes could be determined within one hour. In over one-third of cases, determination required from four hours to over an entire day.

Source: Accenture

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COMPLEXITY AND PERFORMANCE

As noted earlier, VDI offers a wealth of advantages over thick client infrastructure, including improved centralization and overall simplicity, but VDI still retains some scattered complexities of its own. VDI has distinct security concerns that require special attention. There may be more back-end work involved in supporting a wider array of client-side devices. Not least of all, the aforementioned conventional resource monitoring platforms generally require agent software to be installed on each client. Agents tie up local resources, require periodic updating, may not have compatibility with some client devices, and, frankly, are one more thing to go wrong or be exploited by hackers. Agents are accretive to solution complexity.

The irony with agents is that they tend to distort the realities of performance. Imagine three workers in three different parts of town, all experiencing massive client response lag due to a contention storm. Every 15 minutes, the agents on those three devices wake up to assess current conditions. With the first reading, two of the three may report performance within acceptable thresholds. In other words, showers are still spotty around town. Fifteen minutes later, all three report lag, but the agents still don’t trigger a red flag because agent performance assessment averages values over time. One performance monitoring tool sends out an alert to an impending crisis; next generation operations and analytics tools do that too, and automatically direct what emergency personnel to respond and how, and the quickest route to triage they should take.

SMARTER MANAGEMENT

While there are no magic bullets in IT capable of eliminating all problems with a single shot, improving VDI infrastructure management can come close. By making management more informative, intuitive and interactive, much of the trouble described above can be either minimized or eliminated. To illustrate, we will examine Xangati’s monitoring and analysis tools.

Source: ZK Research

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XANGATI STANDS APART THROUGH THREE KEY DIFFERENTIATORS:

1. Live monitoring

Rather than viewing the virtual world through 5-15-minute snapshots, with 30 seconds of darkness in between, Xangati records all status values every second, continuously. Administrators’ eyes are, in effect, constantly open. Because Xangati dashboard readings occur in real-time, admins essentially assess live conditions, rendering 300x more granularity.

2. Massive data

The upside of live monitoring is that it provides deep troves of data from which to derive more accurate assessments of infrastructure conditions. To be useful, those large masses of data must be processed, collated and correlated in real-time. Xangati solves this issue by performing all processing in-memory rather than through a conventional database storage model. An in-memory approach is not only several times faster, thus eliminating noticeable processing latency, but it’s also the only way to effectively scale live monitoring to hundreds or thousands of nodes across all conventional silos.

3. StormTracker

Xangati’s approach emphasizes a graphically intuitive link between real-time conditions, end-user experience, and underlying IT infrastructure. In a nutshell, admins get enough altitude over so much data that they can see contention storms brewing as they form and take appropriate preemptive action.

Xangati VDI Dashboard

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Just as doctors must weigh patient history and test results against current symptoms and verbal feedback in order to reach a diagnosis, Xangati integrates a spectrum of conditions and variables in order to determine performance health, both in the present and predictively. Xangati’s analytics distinguish normal from atypical conditions, then they assess the interactions between adverse states in order to identify underlying causes. As shown above in ZK Research’s findings, traditional virtualization monitoring typically yields hours of investigative troubleshooting before a contention storm’s root cause is identified.

Additionally, the predictive nature of Xangati’s assessments mean that administrators can glimpse more clearly into the actual state of upcoming resource utilization. Whereas admins might have been afraid to set thresholds above 30 percent, they can now raise their utilization bars to 60 or 70 percent without worry. This, in turn, has immediate impact on data center resource utilization and all of the cost benefits that come with increasing efficiency.

Rich data visualization dashboards clearly make monitoring a simpler, more intuitive affair for IT managers. However, the real drop in complexity derived from Xangati’s platform stems from its elimination of agents. This removes a considerable load of management complexity from IT’s shoulders and makes it much easier to scale the monitoring solution across medium-sized and large enterprises, and large public sector institutions.

Not least of all, this agentless approach allows Xangati to perform DVR-like, on-demand recording sessions known as Visual Trouble Tickets. When users experience issues, they can initiate a Visual Trouble Ticket that will capture 15 minutes of all dashboard data and user activity. This encompasses network conditions, desktop status, storage connectivity, and all points in between. The data set arrives at IT in a format that can be scrubbed like a video clip, allowing for frame-by-frame analysis. Performance of the organization’s VDI deployment ratchets up accordingly, resulting in greater responsiveness and a positive experience for all users.

Xangati Storm Tracker

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Conclusion

In the 2014 Frost & Sullivan paper “Lowering the Barriers to VDI Adoption,” author Michael Suby notes several key benefits inherent in VDI technology:

• Lower management burdens owing to centralized maintenance and provisioning

• Fewer break-fix management issues

• Lower risk of data loss owing to data remaining on the server side, not in clients

• Easier integration with bring your own device (BYOD) trends

Persuasive factors to adopt a virtualized desktop model over that of thick clients now abound, particularly in the healthcare industry where stability, security, and compliance are so critical. VMware, Citrix, Microsoft and others offer end-to-end solutions that grow in top-end affordability and bottom-line ROI with each passing year. But to realize that value proposition fully and make it grow, an additional layer of tools focused on real-time monitoring and analytics-driven, predictive maintenance becomes necessary.

The market offers several platforms that offer aspects of an optimal monitoring solution, but none have yet surpassed Xangati for feature depth or ability to address the pressing demands of VDI operation outlined above: cost control, contention management, complexity reduction, and total solution performance enhancement that result in demonstrable service assurance metrics.

To learn more about achieving better management of your healthcare organization’s virtualized infrastructure, read on at

http://xangati.com/resources/literature/.

Additional Resources:

HaysMed Quickly Identifies VDI Performance Issues with Xangati

Case Study Link: http://xangati.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Xangati-Case-Study-Hays-Med-0315.pdf

www.xangati.comPhone: +1 (408) 252-0505Sales Inquiries: sales@xangati.comSupport: support@xangati.com

Xangati is a Silicon Valley infrastructure performance management and service assurance analytics innovator, supporting

complex virtualized data centers and hybrid cloud environments. Organizations such as Comcast, British Gas, Colliers, Harvard

University and the U.S. Army have leveraged Xangati to resolve end-user issues more quickly, optimize virtual applications,

diagnose root causes of contention storms and assure overall infrastructure health. Xangati management dashboards, built on

patented in-memory architecture, provide a live, continuous and interactional view into the entire IT infrastructure with predictive

analytics and prescriptive remediation recommendations.

Additional Resources: Fully-Functional 14-Day Free Trial: https://xangati.com/downloads/

The Xangati Difference

Only Xangati offers a performance management and service assurance solution to provide a second-by-second, live and continuous view into the entire infrastructure with deep analytics and remediation. Xangati increases the agility of IT organizations to rapidly respond to performance issues, deliver increased IT productivity and ensure superior end-user

INFRASTRUCTURE SERVICE ASSURANCE

Xangati collects and analyzes application-level metrics fom virtual servers, virtual desktops and virtual applications to provide deep insights into the overall health of your IT infrastructure and end user quality of experience.

END-TO-END VISIBILITY

Xangati provides unsurpassed end-to-end, live and continuous visibility of the entire IT infrastructure. When a threshold is crossed, or when manually initiated by a user, a recording of the values for all metrics over a set period of time can be saved, emailed and easily navigated in a DVR-like fashion.

PRESCRIPTIVE ANALYTICS & ROOT CAUSE ANALYSIS

The Xangati in-memory analytics engine adjusts thresholds dynamically based on best practices and historical metrics, eliminating the need for tedious manual adjustments. It discovers the cause of alarm and resource contention storms to alert the administrator of root causes for rapid resolution of issues. Scheduled or on-demand reports show resource contention history, capacity utilization and projections (for IT planning) and actions required to mitigate issues.

REAL-TIME AT SCALE

Xangati has proven time and time again that it can scale to meet the needs of the most demanding IT environments. By collecting and analyzing thousands of metrics on a second-by-second basis, unsurpassed visibility and control of the infrastructure is met without the need to install and manage agents.