Keeping vital
healthcare services
running with remoteconnectivity.
How Fraser Health Authority ramped up remote work
capabilities rapidly in response to the COVID-19 pandemic
with a Lenovo ThinkAgile HX hyperconverged infrastructure,
powered by 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, enablinghigh-quality patient services during a province-wide lockdown.

Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions
for The Data-Centered1

Background

Fraser Health Authority is one of Canada’s largest and fastest growing health authorities,
responsible for providing hospital- and community-based health services to over 1.8 million
people in British Columbia (BC). Fraser Health operates 12 hospitals across BC, and offers
residential care, mental health services and state-of-the-art outpatient surgeries.
Fraser Health’s 40,000 clinicians, support staff and volunteers are dedicated to serving
patients, families and communities to deliver on the organization’s vision: better health,best in healthcare.

2Challenge

Wesley Kampff, Workplace Technology Manager at Fraser Health Authority, takes up the story:“Historically, there was limited opportunity for healthcare employees to work remotely. But overthe last few years, demand for remote connectivity has grown.
“At first, this demand was largely driven by administrative use cases, such as enabling ourback-office teams to access email and collaboration tools from home. More recently, we
identified an opportunity to enhance our operational resilience by enabling clinicians tocomplete clinical activities remotely.”
Previously, Fraser Health Authority’s healthcare workers could only access electronic
healthcare records and systems via smartcard-enabled workstations at the organization’s carefacilities. To enable secure, mobile access to these systems, Fraser Health decided to deploy anew IT platform based on Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Remote Desktop Services (RDS).

“We decided to replace all on-site workstations with thin clients,
enabling remote access from corporate laptops and other authorized
devices outside of our internal network. To achieve our goal, we looked
for a robust, scalable hardware platform for the new RDS environment.”
Wesley Kampff
Manager, Workplace Technology,Fraser Health Authority

Finding the right partner.
Fraser Health selected the Lenovo ThinkAgile HX3320 Appliance as theplatform for its RDS environment, and Lenovo ThinkCentre M625 Tiny
and ThinkCentre M715 Tiny desktops as its thin clients.
Kampff comments: “We have used Lenovo PCs in all our hospitals formany years. We already had a great relationship with the Lenovo team,and we knew that Lenovo could support our very complex healthcare
environment.
“To streamline maintenance and support, our preference was to engage
a single vendor to deliver the workstations and data center solutions.
Lenovo’s data center solutions also greatly impressed us. We wereconfident that replacing our traditional three-tier architecture with thecutting-edge ThinkAgile HX hyperconverged platform would offer theperformance, availability and scalability we wanted.”Why Lenovo? Seamless
scalability, speedy shipping.
Fraser Health engaged Microserve—a Lenovo PlatinumPartner, and leading provider of IT solutions to Canada’s
public sector—to deliver eight Lenovo ThinkAgile HX3320
appliances, built on the Intel® Xeon® Gold processor family,
and worked with systems integrator IBM Services to installand configure the cluster.

Combining Lenovo servers, powerful Intel® Xeon® Scalable
processors and Nutanix Enterprise Cloud software, theLenovo ThinkAgile HX platform pools compute and storage
resources in a single virtualized structure for flexible
resource allocation and seamless scalability.

“Lenovo’s flexible, scalable, and reliable
hyperconverged solution is the ideal platform
to support our critical Remote Desktop
Services environment.”

Wesley Kampff
Manager, Workplace Technology,Fraser Health Authority

Reacting fast to the coronavirus crisis.
Fraser Health had only recently begun testing the new RDS
solution when the COVID-19 crisis hit. The pandemic changed
everything. Initially, Fraser Health had sized the environment tosupport 1,000 remote workers. As local lockdowns swept acrossCanada, the organization needed to build out the RDS
environment so that it could support 10,000 remote users.

“We maxed out the memory of our existing appliances, andordered eight additional ThinkAgile HX3320 nodes to expand
capacity,” recalls Kampff. “My team was under immense pressure
to prepare for 10,000 remote users within a very tight deadline.
Lenovo went above and beyond to get the hardware shipped to
us in record time. Considering that COVID-19 brought the world
to a standstill, the fact that Lenovo managed to get the hardware
to us so quickly was a huge achievement.”
He adds: “Once the hardware arrived, it was as simple as adding
the new nodes to the cluster and the virtualized resources wereavailable in the Nutanix Prism management tool.”“We were able to expand capacity in next
to no time with the new hyperconverged
infrastructure—a fraction of the time it
would have taken to stand up a three-tierinfrastructure.”

Wesley Kampff
Manager, Workplace Technology,Fraser Health Authority

3Results

With the Lenovo ThinkAgile HX platform underpinning its RDS environment, Fraser Health has
the capacity to support up to 10,000 remote workers—helping it to deliver high-quality patient
services in a period of unprecedented disruption.
“We currently have around 3,000 people regularly using RDS to work from home and typicallysupport 1,500 concurrent users a day,” says Kampff. “Crucially, we can support many more
people working remotely at a moment’s notice if the need arises. We see that remoteconnectivity is more than just a short-term response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s part of ourlong-term strategy to ensure we can deliver vital health services no matter what.”
Today, clinicians and back-office teams can access the applications and data they need to work
effectively from home via RDS, securely and reliably. For those working on-site, Fraser Health isplanning to deploy compact Lenovo ThinkCentre M625 Tiny and ThinkCentre M715 Tiny
desktops to replace the legacy workstations.
“We’re confident that thin clients from Lenovo will make it even easier for our employees toaccess the digital tools they need to support our patients,” says Kampff. “We have always found
Lenovo equipment to be very reliable and performant, and the ThinkAgile HX platform lives up
to our expectations. Our second batch of HX3320 nodes feature 2nd Gen Intel ® Xeon® Scalable
processors and we’ve been impressed with the performance of the new chipset.”

Capacity to support up
to 10,000 remote workers

Delivering health services tomore than 1.8 million people

“Sound strategic planning, identifying the correct architectural solution, and solid
teamwork with our partners from Microserve and Lenovo made it possible to deliverand implement the Remote Desktop Solution solution quickly and efficiently.”

Wesley Kampff
Manager, Workplace Technology,Fraser Health Authority

What will you do withLenovo ThinkAgile solutions?
The Data-Centered deliver healthcare services in even the most challenging
circumstances with Lenovo smarter infrastructure solutions, powered by Intel®.

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