25 Top Information Managers: 2010
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Paul Sikora, VP of IT transformation, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center
Sikora is clearly star material for his remarkable virtualization and enterprise transformation project at UPMC, a sprawling $8 billion network of 20 hospitals. From a project that began in 2005, Sikora and his colleagues created a robust private cloud that standardized and shrank UPMC's enterprise platform for applications, databases and analytics from 167 servers to just 14. Those 14 servers run more than 500 virtual UNIX instances.
For Windows and Linux, Sikora runs VMware virtualization to support 1,200 Windows instances on 22 servers, replacing 64 full racks of equipment with two-and-a-quarter racks.
With common monitoring and management, UPMC no longer builds out hardware; it provisions and builds capacity in its virtual "factory."
During the project, as UPMC grew in the number of hospitals, employees and patient visits, UNIX instances grew over 300 percent, Windows seats 238 percent and storage 685 percent. "I have more data center space today than I did five years ago, I use the same amount of power, I have 2 percent fewer employees and my budget has been flat," Sikora says.
