Virtualized Servers in the Dental Office

In one of our last posts, we covered the basics of backing up your dental practice data and how Siligent not only backed up your data, but backed up your server. This is becoming more common in large hospitals and with enterprise businesses. As hardware, software and cloud services become easier to use, this ability to backup your server is now easier to implement for small businesses. Lets cover some basics on how servers work in a dental office.

Your server is the brain of your computer infrastructure. This is where all of your practice data is stored, and where your practice management software resides. The server feeds information out to your client computers, which are the computers running in all of your operatories, front desk etc. Your server controls most of the security and preferences in your practice, and determines how all of the other computers interact with each other and the outside world. The server can also control how backups and data are stored. All of this information and the abilities of a server are dependent on the hardware and software that it runs on.

Virtualization, is a word being thrown around a lot when it comes to servers lately. What does that mean and why is it so important to dentists? 

From Wikipedia:

Hardware virtualisation or platform virtualisation refers to the creation of a virtual machine [VM] that acts like a real computer with an operating system. 

Although on the surface that doesn't sound very important, a virtual machine (VM) or virtual server enables the entire server to be hardware agnostic or able to run on any computer you have. The way a VM accomplishes this is that the entire server is completely contained in a single package or container. So, all of the data, the programs, the settings, all the information that the clients need are now based in this virtualized server or self contained package. It will still only run as well as the actual hardware you place it on but it allows you to essentially move or backup the server effectively:

From Wikipedia:

The [VM] can be moved to another host machine with its own hypervisor [software that runs virtual machines]; ... and allow the VM to provide uninterrupted service while its prior physical host is, for example, taken down for physical maintenance...failover allows the VM [virtual machine] to continue operations if the host fails. 

This means two things for a dental server, one is that it can be run or moved to any computer in the office or even the cloud, and two that as a completely contained element, it can be backed up in its entirety so that you are never without a server. This is the important part when we talk about data always being available. If you combine the high availability architecture with a virtualized server, this means not only is your data always available, but so is the system it is running on. By virtualizing the server, you can move that server to run on any machine in the office, and back it up using the high availability cluster as we discussed in the last blog. 

At Siligent, our architecture ensures your systems are available for you and your patients every day. The hardware we choose is enterprise grade, and made to be run 24-7 for years to come. If the rare failure happens to one of the thousands of parts that make up a server, you have the right architecture to avoid costly downtime. Call us or schedule a consult to see what we can do for your practice.