DIAKONIE KLINIKUM IN STUTTGART RELIES ON ... - Transtec

DIAKONIE-KLINIKUM IN STUTTGART RELIES ON VMWARE ESX CLUSTER WITH REDUNDANT DATACORE STORAGE SYSTEM FROM TRANSTEC
Virtualization generates real benefi ts in terms of high availability and performance
“We have to make sure that our employees have unlimited
access to patient-related data at anytime and anywhere.
This not only includes documents but also high-resolution
X-ray data that is stored in the PACS image archives by the
radiology department. Our main priority is to create an absolutely
reliable IT infrastructure. The transtec solution meets
all our technical requirements and its high performance
and reliability are extremely impressive. Excellent value for
money and solution-oriented support and consultation services
during the tendering and planning stages convinced us
over the long term”.
AFSHIN ESFAHANIAN, SYSTEMS AND NETWORK ADMINISTRATION
THE COMPANY
The patient has been at the heart of the Diakonie-Klinikum
Stuttgart for over 150 years. The teaching hospital affi liated
to the University of Tübingen looks back on a rich tradition of
medical treatment and care of patients. Medicine students can
perform the practical part of their studies under the watchful
supervision of experienced doctors at the Diakonie-Klinikum.
Quality is vital in all aspects of hospital life. To acknowledge its
extensive quality management program, the Diakonie-Klinikum
Stuttgart was awarded with the KTQ quality certifi cate (a state
recognition for the cooperation of transparency and quality in
the healthcare sector). The award is a symbol of the employees‘
professionalism as well as their social and welfare skills, their
motivation and their commitment.
13,500 people are treated in the Diakonie-Klinikum and 25,000
patients are treated ambulatory every year. The hospital
employs approx. 1000 people as doctors, nurses, ancillary staff,
technicians, admin staff and counsellors. The clinic offers a total
of 459 beds.
www.transtec.co.uk • transtec.uk@transtec.co.uk • www.ttec.nl • ttec.nl@ttec.nl • www.ttec.be • ttec.be@ttec.be
Quality is an extremely important factor governing all areas of the
Diakonie-Klinikum Stuttgart, an academic teaching hospital and
clinical centre based in Stuttgart, Germany. Just how much priority
the hospital actually places on quality was revealed in 2002 when
the Diakonie-Klinikum Stuttgart was one of the fi rst hospitals to
receive the KTQ quality certifi cate which is a state recognition
awarded to medical institutions displaying high standards in the
healthcare sector.
The Diakonie-Klinikum applies the same quality principles to the task
of providing a solid and high-performance foundation for its entire IT
infrastructure.
FOUR TRANSTEC SERVERS POWER 46 VIRTUAL SERVERS
Four transtec CCV-V55002U virtualization servers and two DataCore
SAN4324M-B storage servers provide most of the performance and
system security the infrastructure needs. These are supported by
the hospital‘s extended IT environment comprising 31 servers and
600 PC workplaces.
The CCV-V55002U virtualization servers from transtec are used in
load-balancing mode and can execute administrative as well as
medical-related tasks ranging from Web server and fi le server functions
and OP management to the generation of medical documentation
and a whole variety of other applications. The regular software
updates for the applications used by the hospital used to involve an
extremely time-consuming process. In addition, the hardware had

“The transtec virtualization solution enables us to release
system resources. We thus achieve maximum fl exibility as
we can adapt the infrastructure to new software profi les
with very few setting changes. The centralised server
management considerably cuts the time previously taken
for many processes. The less physical systems required, the
greater the energy-saving potential.”
AFSHIN ESFAHANIAN, SYSTEMS AND NETWORK ADMINISTRATION
to be replaced extremely frequently in order to ensure powerful
platforms for the increasingly performance-hungry software products.
This race against hardware ageing has today become far easier
to manage thanks to virtualization.
DATACORE ADDS SECURITY TO HIGH-AVAILABILITY STORAGE
The redundant storage pool for the entire network is based on two
transtec SAN4324M-B storage servers. Both systems are confi gured
with the preinstalled DataCore storage virtualization software,
SANmelody. The high-performance software package can actively
prevent program crashes or data loss. Automatic and synchronous
mirroring of the storage drives runs in the background. In the event
of a hardware defect, affected data can be restored in no time
without any loss. This factor is all the more important when you
consider that lost data could also include patient documents in
which the course of a disease or illness and the treatment process
are recorded.
Each one of the SAN4324M-B servers can support up to 24 S-ATA,
SAS or SSD hard drives, offers extensive upgrade options via Fibre
Channel and thus suffi cient resources for growing data volumes. A
maximum of two Intel Xeon 5500 Processors and 144 Gigabytes of
RAM provide the storage servers with enough reserve for the most
demanding requirements.
www.transtec.co.uk • transtec.uk@transtec.co.uk • www.ttec.nl • ttec.nl@ttec.nl • www.ttec.be • ttec.be@ttec.be
THE SOLUTION
The transtec virtualization solution has been seamlessly integrated
into the hospital‘s existing infrastructure. 46 virtual servers
are currently hosting on a total of four transtec CCV-V55002U
ESX servers. These advanced power virtualization servers ensure
easy administration of all running processes; response times have
also been cut drastically. The required storage is provided by two
scalable transtec SAN4324M-B storage servers with DataCore.
Virtualization has helped to drastically reduce the amount of
hardware usually required. It is thus not surprising that a prognosis
of the energy cost savings potential carried out during the
initial planning of the ESX cluster predicted four-fi gure savings (in
Euros). The resulting reduction of cooling systems required also
contributed to further cost cuts.
System installation and confi guration with an investment volume
of 140,000 Euros followed in the fi rst quarter of 2010. transtec also
instructed two users groups in the operation of the VM system
and in the administration of DataCore software.
An effi cient backup solution for virtual environments based on
eESXpress is scheduled.