Dell, Intel, Red Hat, VMware Team On Linux For Health Care

Dell (NASDAQ: DELL), Intel, (NASDAQ: INTC), Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) and VMware (NYSE: VMW) have teamed up to open a dedicated facility for hospitals to test and deploy new healthcare software running on x86 servers using Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux.

The idea is to show small- to medium-sized hospitals and medical facilities that Epic Systems’ electronic health records (EHR) software running on x86 industry-standard servers with Linux can meet the needs of mission-critical healthcare solutions. Inasmuch as the healthcare industry has long been the poster child for proprietary software and hardware, highlighting the cost savings and interoperability advantages offered by an open source platform also is a key priority of the initiative.

Epic is the centerpiece of the new DRIVE (an acronym for the five players) Center of Excellence located near Epic’s headquarters in Verona, Wisc. At the facility, hospitals can test their applications and configurations for end user computing on a variety of server and storage options, conduct cross-functional testing of solutions such as help desk services and disaster recovery, and interact with all the primary third parties involved in a Linux deployment. Epic’s EHR software newly runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, having previously run on AIX and Unix servers...