NSU Dental School Turns to Dell Wyse Thin Clients for Better Training, Data Protection

Dell Cloud Client-Computing

In 1997, Nova Southeastern University (NSU) opened its College of Dental Medicine, a state-of-the-art school that was designed to give its students the most advanced training technology that would enable them to learn the latest dental health techniques. However, as technology advanced over the years, students became increasingly limited by the capabilities of their outdated PCs to support new software, such as radiographs, 3-D imaging and practice management software.

At the same time, NSU administrators were looking for ways to more easily manage the technology their students were using and to reduce the footprint of that technology in the dental training and clinical stations. Furthermore, new federal regulations, such as the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, were putting greater demands on securing patient data in an increasingly digital world.

To meet these multiple demands, the College of Dental Medicine last year made the move to a virtual client environment, bringing more than 300 Dell Wyse 5040 All-in-One thin clients to its primary campus, seven offsite locations and a new dental simulation lab. The college installed 100 Dell Wyse 5040 thin clients in its main clinic, and another 100 at seven offsite clinics in South Florida. Another 130 were deployed at the school's new dental simulation lab on the main campus, a facility used by first- and second-year students to replicate dental procedures on patients.

The thin clients run Wyse ThinOS, a fast and secure operating system, and are powered by AMD's G-Series dual-core 1.4GHz chip, which can boot in less than 10 seconds. Looking to the future, NSU aims to leverage the thin clients' high-end graphic acceleration capabilities.

The results have yielded an improved student training experience, compliance with HITECH regulatory requirements, easier management and significantly reduced costs.

"Overall, by using upgraded back-end Dell EMC hardware and Wyse thin clients, we can give our students everything they need," said Dr. Joel Slingbaum, assistant professor and IT director at NSU's College of Dental Medicine. "We can give them a better opportunity to learn and apply their knowledge and techniques to their educational and clinical goals."

Dell has been a significant player in the thin client and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) spaces for many years. PCs continue to be a key part of Dell's end-to-end enterprise IT solutions portfolio, and its cloud client-computing strategy plays a large role in that effort. The company's acquisition of EMC this year further bolstered Dell's capabilities, not only with client systems and software but also with back-end datacenter systems, such as the VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution. HCI is viewed as an ideal platform for VDI environments.

Dell's leadership in secure thin clients and the institution's existing relationship with Dell was a key factor in NSU's decision to deploy a VDI environment through Dell. According to Dr. Slingbaum, "We did consider other thin client vendors, as well, but we have had a great experience with Dell from a technology and customer service perspective."

The switch to the Wyse thin clients has brought significant benefits to the school and its students, according to Dr. Slingbaum. The 5040 All-in-Ones come with 21.5-inch screens, which are three inches larger than the PCs that students were using.

"Our students have larger screens and improved resolution using the Dell Wyse 5040 thin clients, and that makes training more effective," he said. "They can get the most out of our practice management software. 3-D dental images and radiographs [x-rays] are more diagnostic, and the bigger screens mean they can review training videos and live presentations on the same screen. A key driver of student success is their ability to move from point to point, while accessing the same interface and receiving the same user experience."

The all-in-one thin clients also let the college comply with HITECH requirements around securing patient data because nothing is stored on the local client.

"There is no way of storing patient data locally," Dr. Slingbaum said. "By using our Citrix virtual desktop software on the back end, we can contain all the patient information in the datacenter. We can control access to the desktops, what applications are being used, and what data is accessible through those applications."

Violation of the HITECH requirements could mean thousands of dollars in fines and penalties, he said.

"We had to ensure we were in compliance," Dr. Slingbaum said. "We needed to install machines that could be easily maintained and secured."

IT administrators also have taken advantage of the centralized management enabled by the VDI environment. Setting up new systems and deploying software updates is much faster and easier. Rather than having to apply updates to every endpoint individually, the updates are made centrally and are applied to the thin clients the minute they boot up. The most time-consuming portion of deployment was the process of taking out the old PCs and installing the thin clients and the cable management. While software updates previously required IT employees at each of the school's clinics and took hours to complete, now they're done centrally in a matter of minutes, making college more efficient and productive, Dr. Slingbaum said.

In addition, replacing PCs with the Dell Wyse 5040 thin clients is saving NSU's dental school at least 50 percent in costs, helping to reduce the amount of hardware it has to buy.

"We don't have to purchase full PCs and monitors and deploy them at each station," Dr. Slingbaum said.

NSU is one of a growing number of organizations that are turning to thin clients and VDI as a way to simplify and secure their IT environments while offering their employees and students a familiar user experience. IDC analysts earlier this year said they expect the virtual client market to grow 8.9 percent a year between 2015 and 2020, while a report offered by Research and Markets said growth in the global VDI market will be 11.31 percent a year between 2016 and 2020.

Key market drivers include the easier management and improved security offered by VDI environments, in which corporate applications and data are hosted on servers based in centrally located datacenters or server rooms rather than housed on the endpoints themselves. This is becoming increasingly important as the number of mobile devices -- from laptops to smartphones to tablets -- proliferate and the trend toward bring-your-own-device (BYOD) grows.

"We have been very fortunate in our relationship with Dell as this latest technology refresh has improved patient care, student training and the school's faculty to do research," says Dr. Slingbaum. "We are now poised to tackle the latest technology advancements thanks to Wyse thin clients and we're excited about technology advancements on the horizon that can further enhance our program offerings to students, faculty and patients."

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