Changwon Fatima Hospital Cuts Downtime To Guarantee 24/7 Access to Data and Improve Patient Care

The Challenge

Changwon Fatima Hospital’s IT infrastructure stores and manages all the hospital's data. IT’s role has been to efficiently handle all the hospital’s administrative tasks. These responsibilities include databases, such as a patient electronic medical record (EMR), along with the hospital’s ordering communication system (OCS), picture archiving and communication system (PACS), and management data required for managing the hospital, such as costs.

While the hospital’s IT department infrastructure was successfully managing data, it also needed a successful disaster recovery system. Data is critical in a hospital, and if the system went down, it could impact not only on the hospital and its staff, but also the quality patient care. With its existing infrastructure equipment, the hospital was unable to maintain an uninterrupted medical information service system 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Chief of the Information Support department of Changwon Fatima Hospital, Lee Hak-song explains, “Because all the work in the hospital is tied to our IT, we had an environment where serious sequelae (pathological conditions resulting from a previous disease, injury, therapy or other trauma) could occur if IT failed, affecting the safety of patients. We therefore gave special attention to building the IT environment.”

Lee Hak-song says that “Doing the hospital's work with the [old] IT environment was a major problem with server or storage failures. So, this time, we gave priority to preparing a redundant and tripled IT environment, so that we can return to a normal IT operating environment as soon as possible in the event of a disaster.”

The Solution

To improve data storage infrastructure and reliability, Changwon Fatima Hospital chose to implement two Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G600 (VSP G600) all-flash systems. It also employed the global-active device feature, which enables seamless, active-active functionality between storage arrays, essentially creating a redundant and nondisruptive IT environment.

With the global-active feature, the hospital can guarantee data availability, as it allows uninterrupted volume movement between storage units. Even if one of the storage units fails, the application can continue to run without administrator intervention. In the event of a system failure, global-active device enables normal service to resume in the shortest possible time. Lee Hak-song recalls, “We learned that global-active device implements functions that we could not even think of in 2009 when we first built the disaster recovery center.”

To create a “data protection” environment, Hitachi Data Instance Director (HDID) known in South Korea as Live Protector was introduced. HDID is a data protection solution that supports a cost-effective infrastructure that focuses not only on the recovery of backup data but also on its utilization. By using only storage resources to protect data, impact on production servers can be avoided. And, administrators can mount and use backup images as development, query and test servers without the need for additional equipment or software.

Additionally, Hitachi’s VSP G400 unified storage with high-performance NAS modules enables the rapid delivery of high-resolution, high-capacity medical images that reduce power, cooling and space consumption in the data center. This, in turn, reduced overall operating costs.

To streamline IT operations, Changwon Fatima Hospital now utilizes Hitachi’s EMR and PACS for its data analysis. The storage and backup solutions are operated on a single screen to easily make management decisions.

Outcomes

Changwon Fatima Hospital is now prepared for any unexpected system failures and can minimize downtime to ensure data availability. With 24/7 access to data, the hospital can improve efficiencies and ultimately improve patient care. “By implementing the VSP G600 and global-active device, our infrastructure is redundant and can provide stable services,” says Lee Hak-song. “The system automatically notifies us when an event is detected, such as for manual server and storage failures, improving manageability.”

Additionally, HDID provides reliable backup of the database data, virtualization, EMR, PACS image and VMware data, and eliminates a need for primary and secondary backup environments.

With Hitachi’s all-flash solution, the hospital’s database response speed is four times greater than what its previous infrastructure achieved. With the new systems, Changwon Fatima Hospital found that rapid medical information processing was possible. The SQL response rate is five times faster, dropping from 2ms (milliseconds) to 0.4ms on average. Further, CPU usage also improved by 7 – 10 times, increasing from 4 – 7% to 30 – 80%, so IT can accommodate four times the current load sizes in the future.