Virtualization vital to vaccine tracking

• By Brian Robinson
• Oct 18, 2011

Developing virtualized IT infrastructures is now all the rage throughout government as a way of cutting costs and reducing complexity. For the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, it was vital to its ability to roll out the Vaccine Tracking System on schedule.

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“We were running on a very tight timeline,” said Agha Nabeel Khan, acting director of the NCIRD’s office of informatics. “We did have the planning in place and a very strong project management practice, but there are things that take time to develop.”

A virtual environment allows users to add resources quickly, as needed, and also to bring them down very quickly, he said. That wouldn’t be possible with a physical server environment, which takes a lot longer to manage. 

Simply because of the size of the VTrckS project and the large footprint it had across the CDC, the use of a virtualized environment made it much easier and faster to develop things than it would have been with a physical server setup. In the end, Khan said, almost all the NCIRD’s infrastructure for the project was virtualized.