Zigong First People’s Hospital was a 3A-Grade comprehensive public hospital in Sichuan Province, China. Founded in 1908, Zigong First People’s Hospital has established 8 national bases and 6 national centers such as the Advanced Stroke Center and Chest Pain Center, with a daily outpatient number of 5,500 and an annual outpatient number of 2 million.

Previously, the hospital’s data center mainly relied on VMware virtualization servers and physical servers, leading to various challenges such as resource waste, complicated O&M, long waits for product updates, and frequent business downtime caused by upgrading. As patient-care-related systems like HIS and EMR require high stability, the IT team decided to carry out digital transformation of their IT infrastructure, using a cloud-native platform to support mission-critical applications that have been rebuilt in the microservice architecture.

Ultimately, after a long time examination, Zigong First People’s Hospital picked SmartX Enterprise Cloud Platform (ECP) to support both virtualized and containerized applications including HIS and EMR. Overall, with SmartX ECP, the hospital has fulfilled the goals of IT infrastructure modernization and achieved integrated management of virtualized and containerized environments.

From Application to IT Infrastructure: A Step-by-Step Cloud-Native Transformation

The hospital IT team’s first challenge was to decide how to carry out the cloud-native transformation for the whole IT system. Considering the lack of evaluation of the compatibility between healthcare application systems and cloud-native infrastructure (both software and hardware), Wang Wei, Director of the hospital IT team, prompted a “two-step” strategy, with first containerizing applications and then introducing SmartX ECP as the cloud-native foundation.

Containerizing applications based on openEuler

First, given the stability, security, and other advantages of openEuler, Zigong First People’s Hospital successfully containerized core applications. Each application has its own file system, CPU, memory, process space, etc., fully decoupling from the operating system and hardware devices. This approach effectively minimizes the complexity of the underlying heterogeneous infrastructure, as well as applications’ dependency on hardware-assisted virtualization technology, eliminating the demand for compatible adaptation between operating systems and software. 

Besides, leveraging the orchestration engine, the hospital IT team also achieves the real-time monitoring and dynamic scheduling of application resources, reducing manual intervention and improving the entire system‘s availability.

Introducing SmartX ECP for unified management of VMs and containers

After containerizing applications, Zigong First People’s Hospital upgraded its IT infrastructure by introducing SmartX ECP to replace legacy VMware virtualization. 

Originally, the hospital ran its core applications on a cluster consisting of 12 quad-core and 8 dual-core VMware virtualization servers (ESXi version 7), with the core database running on physical machines. The backend was equipped with two sets of active-active array storage. 

By transitioning to SmartX ECP, the hospital has seamlessly upgraded its data center in a software-defined approach; installing SMTX OS (SmartX ECP’s hyperconverged compute and storage component) on physical servers, the hospital easily built hyperconverged clusters that decouple from hardware devices and pool infrastructure resources such as computing, storage, and network. 

Moreover, the hospital has deployed SKS (SmartX ECP’s Kubernetes engine) clusters based on SMTX OS for unified management of virtualized and containerized workloads. Both the one-click deployment of SKS and the integrated management of VM and container clusters are achieved through CloudTower (SmartX ECP’s unified management platform). SKS also enables the interconnection and interoperability of applications in virtualized and containerized environments, which enhances business efficiency and allows users to set unified network security policies for the two environments.

At present, the hospital IT team has replaced VMware virtualization with 4 SmartX ECP nodes, supporting both virtualized and containerized applications including HIS, EMR, integration platform, and their corresponding databases. 

Leveraging SKS services, the IT team has also achieved the lifecycle management of Kubernetes clusters (a total of 19 Kubernetes worker nodes). During the business peak period (8am-12pm and 1pm-5pm), the business instances can be automatically expanded, and resources can be automatically recollected after the peak hour. Meanwhile, the hospital begins to expand backup and report instances, realizing elastic scaling and effectively saving the hospital’s hardware resource investment. 

Up to now, the whole system has been running stably for nearly one year.

Benefits of SmartX ECP: Boosting Hospital IT Service Efficiency with Cloud-Native Agility

Reduce costs and increase resource utilization

As SmartX ECP integrates computing, storage, and networking in a software-defined approach, it simplifies IT infrastructure and reduces TCO. SmartX ECP is also more efficient (two times faster) in resource provisioning compared to VMware virtualization plus centralized storage.

Improve network efficiency

By replacing the FC SAN switch with a 25GbE storage network that supports RDMA, SmartX ECP effectively reduces data transmission latency and improves the system’s overall performance. After enabling RDMA, SmartX ECP’s bandwidth performance increased by 216.67%, and bandwidth latency decreased by 55.96%.

Unified management of VMs and containers

SmartX ECP allows users to collaboratively manage container and VM resources on the same platform, significantly reducing users’ O&M burden and improving infrastructure management efficiency. 

The core value of SmartX ECP lies in its business-accelerating capabilities derived from its unified provisioning and support of IaaS resources. In the future, Zigong First People’s Hospital will go further in its cloud-native journey by strengthening the construction of PaaS capabilities and examining the technical architecture of the new-generation cloud container services.

Learn more about healthcare institutions’ use cases of SmartX ECP:

Xuanwu Hospital: Leveraging HCI to Support Critical Systems and Accelerate Digital Transformation

SmartX x Lyniate Rhapsody: Boost Healthcare Integration Engine’s Performance on HCI Platform

Hyperconvergence: A CIO’s Secret of Hospital Digital Transformation

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