Customer Stories

posted on 10 April 2008 15:37

Amberg is a small town in Bavaria, Germany. It is located in Oberpfalz (the "Upper Palatinate"), roughly halfway between Regensburg and Bayreuth, and north and slightly east of Munich. The town has a large community and teaching hospital, St. Marien Amberg Hospital, with 554 beds.

In it a 12-person hospital IT team administrates approximately 650 workstations used by 1,300 members of staff. The hospital operates around-the-clock, so constant access to patient data must be guaranteed. Also the medical data has to be retained with archiving periods lasting up to 30 years.

Over the last few years hospitals have dragged themselves, sometime screaming and kicking, into the digital age. One of the bastions that had to fall to the digital siege was the x-ray. As medical images became more and more important to diagnosis and treatment results monitoring, and as the types of images increased from basic x-rays to scans of various kinds such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), so it became obvious that images should be digitised, stored centrally, and sent over hospital networks to doctors who are seeing patients.

Thus PACS, picture archiving and communications systems, were set up. It has not been easy. There are multiple imaging devices and many different hospital IT infrastructures. PACS implementations have taken place across Europe in the past ten years or so. The St Marien Hospital at Amberg set up its own PACS operation in 2005.

This relatively late installation bought an advantage. Five years earlier and physical servers would have had to be used. But in 2005 VMware had arrived. That was very convenient as there was tremendous pressure on the hospital’s budget. It means virtual servers could be used.

So, to increase flexibility and to optimise the utilisation of resources and meet its budget constraints, the hospital decided to use virtual servers running under VMware for the PACS project. But that choice entailed a subsequent storage choice; the virtual servers needed to access a consolidated, a shared storage infrastructure. With pressure on budgets expensive storage area network (SAN) products were not an option.

The German IT integrator transtec installed a high-availability and shared storage virtualisation system, based on DataCore’s SANmelody, to store the PACS images. This storage has a mirrored capacity of 2x 9 TB and can be scaled by at least a factor of five.

The DataCore storage servers supply 35 virtual machines with the PACS archive, a backup server, various file and database servers for the management information system (MIS) and several web applications with high-availability storage capacity. DataCore’s Thin Provisioning is used for the dynamic and automatic allocation of virtual disks, meaning that up to 95 percent of the existing storage capacity can be used before additional disk drives have to be allocated – resulting in less hardware required, meaning bought, reduced maintenance and lowered energy consumption.

The bottom-line: costs dropped by 50 percent in the computer centre. That was very much appreciated.

SANmelody was installed on two industry-standard servers in the hospital site. These servers are located in separate fire-protected compartments within the computer centre and have high performance quad-core Xeon 5400 CPUs, and a 16 GB cache. By using its own performance acceleration caching algorithms, DataCore’s SANmelody speeds up read and write access times, providing a maximum performance of well over 200,000 I/O operations per second, per server.

The two separate servers, as well as dual switches and Fibre Channel paths, ensure redundancy, for the data and also for data routing. The SANmelody storage servers form an active/active high-availability pair for fail-safe data protection across the SAN.

As a way of increasing the resource savings, SANmelody was also used to structure the data archives into various storage pools with different service levels.

Dr Braeuer is the hospital’s head of IT. He said: “SANmelody is a flexible, highly functional and fail-safe storage system that completely fulfils our expectations and optimally supplements the VMware virtualisation with regard to storage. SANmelody is now an important and integral component of our server and storage unit consolidation program. We have increased both availability and performance and are able to make server platforms, including their storage, available more quickly. Future storage space extensions will simply involve buying inexpensive disk shelves.”

Dr Braeuer added: “By using a combination of DataCore storage and VMware server virtualisation, we have laid the foundation for an IT environment of the future; more flexibility, more functionality and performance, less hardware.”

St Marien’s virtual infrastructure not only offers high availability, better performance and lower management costs, but also halves the electricity and cooling costs by using less hardware to do more work. Thus the hospital has not only advanced into the digital PACS age but has also progressed its green, energy-efficiency agenda. A sweet SAN melody indeed.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}