CASE STUDY

1E NOMAD

NOMAD HELPED
RIVERSIDE HEALTH
SYSTEM ACHIEVE
15-MINUTE
UPGRADES
Migration from Windows XP to Windows 7 was a
daunting challenge for Riversides 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.
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Solution
1Es 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.

1E NOMAD

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 organizations 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.
Riversides 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 Riversides Wide Area Network (WAN),
the process of migrating away from Windows XP posed a significant challenge.
Riversides 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, Riversides 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 1Es Nomad Windows Software Deployment
Tool.
Once the roll-out began, buy-in from the rest of Riversides 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 managements
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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1E NOMAD

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 Riversides 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 companys 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), Riversides 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 users 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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1E NOMAD

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

About 1E
1Es suite of disruptive IT operations management tools save billions, solve problems and
simplify the management of large, complex IT environments in record time. Designed
with a singular focus to help drive down costs, 1Es solutions include tools for IT asset
management, Windows systems management and BYOPC.
Contact us
UK (HQ): +44 20 8326 3880

US: +1 866 592 4214

India: +91 120 402 4000 info@1e.com

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