Columbia Memorial Hospital serves more than 100,000 residents in the Columbia, Greene and Dutchess counties of New York State.  The hospital focuses on advanced surgery, primary care and health education. It is a 192-bed acute care hospital, operates a 120-bed long-term care site as well as 26 outlying primary and specialty care centers.

It is also an innovator in using healthcare IT to improve the quality and access to patient care in its community.

And for that, it has been named a Laureate by the prestidious Computerworld Honors Program, which recognizes organizations and individuals who have used information technology to promote and advance public welfare, benefit society and change the world for the better.

We’re especially pleased that Stratus, and our partners eClinicalWorks and VMware, were chosen by the Hospital and Cathleen Crowley, CIO, for a solution that met their objectives:  creating a private cloud environment to make electronic medical records (EMRs) accessible across the many settings where patients receive treatment: the hospital campus, physicians’ offices and local nursing homes.  The benefits were considerable – so too was the challenge of serving over 200 clinicians, in more than 25 locations, who would access patient records over a secure Web interface on a 24/7 basis.

Columbia turned to trusted partners in achieving these objectives and ultimately succeeding – Stratus ftServers and storage arrays form the core of this cloud infrastructure to ensure the uptime required while simplifying operations and management.  Columbia selected eClinicalWorks for a robust ambulatory EMR solution which met the requirements across this broad set of users and facilities.  And implementing virtualization on the Stratus fault-tolerant servers with VMware allows Columbia to run the eClinicalWorks applications within virtual machines to increase flexibility and efficiency in delivering services within the data center.

Congratulations to Columbia Memorial for such a well deserved honor, and we at Stratus thank our partners, eClinicalWorks and VMware, for working together in creating a showcase that others can apply to their own environments.

In this article on Forbes.com, Ramin Sayar, VP of products for enterprise management at VMware may be getting way ahead of himself.

Mr. Sayar is a true futurist. He can fast-forward to an world where today’s realities and complexities have become objects of historical quaintness; where the short-sightedness of today’s IT operations management has passed into obscurity and been replaced by perfect synchronization; where the complexities and shortcomings of his own company’s software have vanished.

It will be nice not having to deal with silly things like sunk technology investments, byzantine software licensing, applications unsupported for virtualization, regulatory compliance, vendor lock-in, immature software management tools, availability and security concerns, hollow SLAs, response latencies, network failures. And who wouldn’t want phone service where there is always dial-tone, no detectable latency, or poor call quality? It’s comforting knowing that someone actually has that.

There’s no question that virtualization has improved IT infrastructure, maybe even “modernized” it (after all virtualization has been around for three decades). Virtualization and cloud computing, however, are so very far from being intricately linked. Believing so is like telling someone to speed up so they get to their car accident faster. We may get to Mr. Sayar’s world sooner rather than later, but don’t hold your breath.

We hear and read about it everywhere. Committing critical business applications to virtualization and private cloud is a big IT concern. Information Management’s article, “Server Virtualization Faces Real Problems” points out two: increasing storage costs and uptime assurance.RE the latter, critical apps can’t go down. Server virtualization makes things more complicated in the data center, including supposed strong suits like business continuity. It wasn’t designed for it, so getting high uptime levels takes extraordinary effort. Have your cake and eat it too, just as many Stratus customers have … Westpac Bank, DOElegal, and Pinellas County, for example.