VMware recognizes MDS SI as a trusted digital transformation partner in the UAE

At the VMware 2020 Partnership Leadership Summit, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger recognized MDS SI as a trusted digital transformation partner, and spoke about the company’s support in helping the American Hospital of Dubai (AHD) convert a hotel into a field hospital during the COVID-19 emergency.

The Summit in November was attended by many prominent C-level leaders and General Managers from the partner eco-system across the EMEA region. The relationship between MDS SI and American Hospital in Dubai has deep roots, stretching back over seven years. Solutions covered range from IT infrastructure systems to building a world-class private cloud system.

The recent challenge faced by AHD and their partners was significant. When the pandemic reached the UAE, AHD had to prioritize multiple factors:

1. Transforming a hotel into an operational, 390-bed field hospital for COVID-19 patients, including secure access to the main hospital IT services.
2. Strengthening remote-working capabilities for the hospital’s administrative employees, which included call center, finance and HR functions among other areas.
3. Launching a new tele-health service – months earlier than planned – to ensure patients can still access medical experts and treatments. This was vital to patients and hospital operations.

Infrastructure security, reliability and performance were top of the agenda as the IT team readied the new facility. The team bolstered IT security measures, too. They needed to quickly minimize the exposure of patient data at a much higher standard than guest room security requires. The task included re-configuring the network, implementing firewalls and securing the computing environment to extend the hospital’s main campus network to the field hospital.

The healthcare organization benefited from the seamless access and agility enabled by its software-defined digital foundation. Hyper-converged infrastructure is the key to faster time to market and will also assist AHD in their next phase of deployment and transformation, as VMware solutions are extremely agile and scale-able on demand.

Next steps for the project

Next steps AHD is planning include building a private cloud, and ensuing that the shared IT service platform will assist both AHD and the Mohammad Obaid Al-Mulla Group. Instead of having unhelpful silos, everything will be migrated to one single platform with Vrealize, and many infrastructure operations will be automated to roll out services more quickly.

MDS SI has been focusing on making AHD a complete Software Defined Data Center (SDDC). The facility servers and storage are virtualized using VSAN and Vsphere as core technologies, and MDS SI have already started with the deployment of their private cloud infrastructure (SDDC platform).