Shanghai Jiantong University Affiliated Ruijin Hospital

The hospital was established in 1907 and it is formerly known as Kuangtse Hospital, this is large comprehensive teaching hospital with a grade of III-A. The hospital covers an area of 120,000 square meters, its construction area is up to 245,000 square meters, the hospital owns 43 sectors and departments, 1600 approved beds, 1800 open beds, the employee number of the hospital is up to 3496, including 1010 physicians. Ruijin Hospital has complete department arrangements and powerful technical forces, it has relatively high level of medical, scientific research and teaching. The hospital is very reputable both at home and on abroad. In 2010, the outpatient number of the hospital was 2.706 million and the surgical cases were up to 41,200, number of the discharged patients was 76,000 and the average hospital staying period was 8.68 days.

Project background

It is an inevitable trend to introduce market-oriented operation in the medical industry and promote modern and scientific enterprise management in various medical and health care institutions. To occupy a leading position in the new medical market pattern, Ruijin Hospital appropriately proposed the development principle of “building the hospital by quality, building the hospital by talents and building the hospital by technology” and the development trend of “digital hospital, personalized service, innovative technology and ecological hospital”, the final objective of the hospital is to provide high-quality medical and relevant services for the public.  

Challenges facing by the hospital information center

In the previous construction of hospital information, HIS, PACS, LIS, RIS, electronic patient records, social insurance and some other systems are built in different batches, data in each system is in a distributed storage state, data also has different storage method and storage media. Servers with such a distributed pattern and storage architecture can not be maintained conveniently and the relevant cost is relatively high, different systems are quite difficult to achieve sharing and balance in aspect of resources application. Therefore, Ruijin Hospital urgently needs to build a fundamental platform to realize sustainable development, this is conducive to data security and system stability, meanwhile, it may significantly reduce the operation cost and the TCO of the data center, thus to provide better applications for the hospital. Meanwhile, with the acceleration of hospital information construction, new applications are increasingly deployed, this means that the server quantity is increasing, subsequently, the energy consumable data center has to face larger pressures in aspects of power wiring, room ventilation, air conditioning cooling and so on. Additionally, with the increasingly deepening of applications, the hospital has to continuously develop other applications in the future, the system is bound to be expanded in capacity continuously. For example, if new application systems are purchased, how to stably operate the new application systems on the new device will become an extremely difficult problem. Therefore, how to achieve the flexible configurations of applications and minimize the deployment application time will also become a huge challenge for building a new generation of data center.

Sugon solutions for Ruijin Hospital

Through careful evaluation and demonstration, Ruijin Hospital finally decided to build a new generation of data center based on the virtualized infrastructure. The entire solution is based on the Ethernet design, highly available dual network environment is adopted, Sugon fiber disk array will be used to design the storage system based on the FC-SAN architecture, the server end adopts the dual redundant HBA cards, two sets of fiber switches will be connected to the storage device, so that to ensure the high availability of the storage linkage, the storage device adopted is Sugon high-end dual-controller disk array, the entire storage environment may achieve full redundancy, so that to effectively ensure the data reliability.

By using the virtualization technology, relying on the business continuity, Ruijin Hospital eliminated the expected downtime in the performance of maintenance, meanwhile, through the reliable, economical and efficiency disaster recovery solution, the hospital may effectively make response to unexpected downtimes. The virtualization platform is able to continuously monitor the utilization of all resource pools and, based on the business demands, smartly distribute the available resources between multiple virtual machines, so that to achieve resource optimization. The host migration function is able to migrate the running virtual server from one physical server to another physical server, in such a process, the application service will not be interrupted, thus the uninterrupted IT environment maintenance may be realized, so that to ensure the business continuity and high availability.

The virtualized business computing resources platform is built by using Sugon’s high-performance servers, they are used to jointly undertake the daily operation of HIS, PACS, RIS, LIS, OA, Web and other main applications.

Benefits for customer

After using the virtualized infrastructure, through servers integration, Ruijin Hospital has effectively controlled and reduced the number of physical servers, TCO and hardware cost have been significantly reduced, the utilization of a single physical server is improved to 60-80% from the original 5-15%. Meanwhile, the operation and maintenance costs are greatly reduced, including the costs for data center space, cabinet, power consumed, cooling and human resources, etc.

The hospital information center is able to initiatively plan the resource growth in advance so that to make rapid response to customer and application demands, long-term procurement process is no longer necessary. Meanwhile, hardware maintenance no longer requires several days or even several weeks for change preparation and 1-3 hour maintenance window, rapid hardware maintenance and upgrades may be implemented immediately, thus the management efficiency may be greatly improved.