In recent years, many healthcare institutions have accelerated the modernization of their IT infrastructure. Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), known for its simplified architecture, scalability, and reliability, has become a preferred strategy for hospital IT transformation.
As a leading vendor of HCI-based enterprise cloud platform vendor, SmartX has supported nearly 200 healthcare institutions—70% of which are Grade 3 and above—in modernizing their IT infrastructure with SmartX Enterprise Cloud Platform (ECP). With a total deployment scale of more than 1,000 nodes, SmartX ECP enables healthcare customers to address six key application scenarios:
- Building enterprise cloud platform capable of running core clinical systems and databases
- Replacing VMware and Nutanix
- Achieving disaster recovery (DR) across multiple campuses
- Supporting hospital-specific applications such as integration platforms and PACS
- Advancing cloud-native transformation
- Migrating from public cloud to on-premises platforms
This all-in-one platform helps healthcare institutions reduce costs, improve efficiency, and meet diverse infrastructure needs. This blog will focus on SmartX ECP’s use cases in building enterprise cloud platforms capable of running core clinical systems and databases and replacing VMware and Nutanix in healthcare institutions.
#1 Building Enterprise Cloud Platforms Capable of Running Core Clinical Systems and Databases
SmartX ECP delivers core infrastructure components—including virtualization, distributed storage, networking and security, Kubernetes management, and DR—in a unified, flexible, and streamlined cloud architecture. Many hospitals of various scales use it to support mission-critical systems such as HIS, EMR, LIS, PACS, and integration platforms, and databases. In some cases, a single SmartX ECP cluster can even support the entire hospital’s IT systems and databases, enabling the construction of cost-effective, scalable, and reliable cloud platforms.
The Third Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University: Expanded SmartX ECP Deployment Five Times to Support EMR, PACS, and Other Core Systems
As one of the earliest Modern Medicine hospitals in China, the Third Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University originally relied on blade servers and physical machines to support its core hospital systems and databases. However, with rapidly growing business demands, the hospital faced challenges such as limited data center space, lack of scalability, and high infrastructure costs.
Since 2018, the hospital has adopted the SmartX ECP, building a heterogeneous ECP cluster using servers from multiple vendors. Throughout five expansions, SmartX ECP has gradually taken over core application systems in the original campus—including EMR (Oracle + DG), PACS (SQL Server), integration platforms, and surgical anesthesia systems—as well as new systems in the newly established campus, such as EMR, HIS middleware, and various other applications. The hospital has also completed a smooth transition from VMware virtualization to SmartX’s native hypervisor, ELF.
The First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University: Driving Cloud Transformation of IT Infrastructure with ECP to Empower Smart Healthcare
As a century-old institution founded in 1910, the First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University initially relied on a traditional infrastructure of physical servers or VMware virtualization combined with all-flash active-active storage to support its core hospital applications. However, as healthcare IT systems rapidly evolved and expanded, the hospital faced challenges such as limited data center space and the fast-growing number of virtual machines (VMs).
Starting in 2018, the hospital adopted HCI as the core strategy for its IT modernization. Leveraging the SmartX ECP, the hospital gradually deployed over 300 VMs to support a wide range of application systems, including the ESB integration platform, PACS, HIS, critical care systems, internet hospital, as well as administrative, research, and teaching applications. This transformation significantly enhanced the hospital’s cloud capabilities and clinical service efficiency, accelerating the development of its smart hospital initiatives.
Xuanwu Hospital of the Capital Medical University: Running Critical Systems on ELF Virtualization with HIS Database DR Protection
Xuanwu Hospital of the Capital Medical University is a Grade 3A (top-tier) general hospital specializing in neuroscience and geriatrics. Considering the needs for cloud-based transformation, horizontal scalability, system stability, and the requirement of domestic technology adoption, the hospital introduced SmartX ECP powered by the native virtualization platform ELF to gradually replace its existing VMware virtualization clusters.
The SmartX ECP platform now supports critical systems, including the standby HIS database, IIH infrastructure (Redis), PACS front-end, anesthesia management, and data quality monitoring. Notably, DR for the HIS standby database is achieved through Oracle ADG, ensuring protection for the primary database appliance. The ECP cluster has been running stably for over three years, and the hospital reports high satisfaction with SmartX’s professional and responsive support services.
Learn more:
Xuanwu Hospital: Leveraging HCI to Support Critical Systems and Accelerate Digital Transformation
Why Enterprises Choose SmartX ELF Virtualization as a VMware Alternative: Five Customer Stories
The First Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University: Supporting Integration Platform and VDI Workloads, Advancing Cloud-Native Transformation
The First Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University (FAHSU) previously relied on foreign HCI products for its IT foundation. In light of the withdrawal of several international vendors from the Chinese market, the hospital began evaluating domestic alternatives to support its integration platform and the VDI environment for a newly constructed campus.
Following a thorough assessment of product stability and reliability, FAHSU selected SmartX ECP, built on x86 servers. The solution was deployed in conjunction with both vSphere and SmartX’s native virtualization platform, ELF, to support the hospital-wide integration platform and VDI systems at the new campus. In parallel, FAHSU also built a SmartX ECP cluster on Kunpeng CPU servers, ensuring full compatibility with domestic hardware. The hospital is further exploring cloud-native transformation by leveraging SMTX Kubernetes Service (SKS) to run containerized applications, achieving unified management across virtualized and container environments.
Yulin Hospital of TCM: Built SmartX ECP on Existing Hardware to Support HIS, EMR, and Full New Campus Operations
As the largest 3A-grade TCM hospital in Yulin, Yulin Hospital of TCM has established extensive internal and external HCI clusters (total of 11 nodes) with SMTX Halo Appliance to support all services at the new campus data center, including core application systems such as HIS and EMR, as well as corresponding databases. Despite a limited budget, the hospital has successfully implemented the construction using only 3 existing Inspur industry-standard servers and 4 Lenovo industry-standard servers. Moreover, the hospital opts to use SmartX native hypervisor ELF as a cost-effective alternative to the high-cost VMware virtualization, which further reduces construction expenses.
Learn more: Reuse Existing Devices with SmartX HCI: 4 Customers Achieve IT Infra Transformation at a Lower Cost
Lezhi Hospital of TCM: Replaced VMware with ELF to Run Nearly All Core Systems and Databases
Lezhi Hospital of TCM originally relied on a VMware virtualization platform combined with centralized storage to run its core hospital systems. In light of the risks associated with the VMware acquisition, the hospital began exploring domestic alternatives.
After an extensive evaluation, the hospital ultimately adopted a SmartX ECP active-active cluster as the foundation of its private cloud. This platform now supports nearly all core application systems and databases, including HIS, EMR, the integration platform, and PACS. It also supports the new operating system for coordinate software, Anolis OS 8. The hospital utilized SMTX Migration Tool to smoothly migrate workloads from the legacy VMware environment. By unifying virtualization, storage, and networking through the SmartX ECP active-active cluster, the hospital has significantly improved infrastructure reliability and data security.
#2 Replacing VMware and Nutanix
As VMware and Nutanix continue to adjust their service policies in China, many healthcare institutions are now exploring domestic alternatives alongside their IT infrastructure upgrades, driven by concerns over support continuity, operational costs, and long-term service availability.
To address these needs, SmartX offers a full-stack ECP solution with production-grade replacement capabilities. Its core components—distributed storage, ZBS, and native hypervisor, ELF—are fully self-developed, and their reliability has been validated by over 600 enterprises across finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and other industries in real-world production environments. To facilitate seamless transitions, SmartX also provides migration tools such as SMTX Migration Tool and SMTX CloudMove, enabling smooth workload migration from physical servers, public clouds, and other virtualization platforms to ELF.
To learn more, please refer to:
Why Enterprises Choose SmartX ELF Virtualization as a VMware Alternative: Five Customer Stories
SmartX vs Nutanix: Product and Performance Comparison, Migration Approaches and Use Cases
Huashan Hospital Affiliated to Fudan University: Replaced Both vSphere and vSAN with SmartX ECP, Enhanced Data Security with Everoute and SMTX Backup & DR
Huashan Hospital Affiliated to Fudan University had long relied on VMware vSphere and vSAN to support its core IT systems. However, in light of the risks introduced by VMware’s acquisition by Broadcom and the growing demand for IT localization, the hospital urgently needed a stable, autonomous, and controllable alternative solution. The solution also needed to support unified management across multiple campuses and enable seamless business migration.
After a thorough evaluation, the hospital selected SmartX ECP (built on ELF) and deployed it on domestic servers. Using the SMTX Migration Tool, the hospital successfully migrated over 40 VMware VMs in the production environment—including application systems for anesthesia, financial services, and more—to SmartX ECP without any service interruption. To further enhance data protection, the hospital also deployed Everoute distributed firewall and SMTX Backup & DR solutions.
Through proof-of-concept (POC) testing, the hospital verified that the performance and stability of the SmartX ECP platform fully meet the requirements for replacing VMware, while also reducing O&M complexity by 50% and improving business continuity. Looking ahead, Huashan Hospital plans to reutilize eight existing vSphere servers in phases to expand its SmartX ECP cluster. With CloudTower, it will centrally manage multiple resource pools to support future business growth.
A Provincial People’s Hospital: Replaced vSphere and vSAN with SmartX ECP to Advance IT Localization Transformation
A provincial people’s hospital initially relied on VMware virtualization and vSAN to support its healthcare service systems. As a designated provincial pilot institution for the healthcare IT localization initiative, the hospital planned to adopt a domestic HCI solution, realizing the IT localization and replacing VMware solutions.
After an extensive evaluation, the hospital deployed a SmartX ECP cluster based on Hygon servers to run its OA management platform along with several newly developed application systems, including an epidemiological investigation platform, a privacy computing platform, a standardized oncology platform, and so on.
During the migration process, the hospital used both SMTX CloudMove and SMTX Migration Tool, selecting the appropriate tool based on the needs of each workload, to smoothly migrate services from multiple virtualization platforms to the new SmartX ECP cluster. After approximately one year of stable operation, the hospital has decided to further expand the SmartX cluster to support additional application systems.
Jiangsu Province Hospital on Integration of Chinese and Western Medicine: Gradual Transition to Fully Replace vSphere and vSAN
Through a two-phase project, Jiangsu Province Hospital on Integration of Chinese and Western Medicine has gradually achieved complete replacement of VMware vSAN and vSphere.
In the first phase, the hospital replaced the vSAN in the VMware HCI architecture with SmartX ECP. This cluster now runs all core business systems and databases except for the HIS. While maintaining compatibility with vSphere usage habits, SmartX’s self-developed distributed storage, ZBS, delivers higher performance and stability compared to vSAN, offering healthcare institutions a flexible alternative for VMware replacement.
After fully validating the performance and stability of SmartX ECP, the hospital proceeded to the second phase by building active-active data centers using SmartX ECP with ELF virtualization. This new infrastructure supports all critical business systems, data warehouses, and databases—excluding only the shared HIS and EMR databases—with a high-performance, highly reliable active-active architecture. This transition not only helped the hospital reduce VMware licensing costs but also significantly enhanced the overall infrastructure reliability.
More Resources：Four Case Studies Disclose How to Replace vSAN and VMware HCI with SmartX HCI
Top-Tier Military Hospital: SmartX ECP Ensures Efficient Replacement Following Delayed Nutanix Support
A top-tier military hospital originally adopted a Nutanix HCI solution (paired with VMware virtualization) to support its internal network application systems. However, as Nutanix adjusted its service strategy in China, the hospital began experiencing frequent delays in IT support.
With the maintenance service for the Nutanix cluster also nearing expiration, concerns about service gaps impacting business continuity and IT operational efficiency prompted the hospital to replace the Nutanix cluster with the SmartX ECP solution using native ELF virtualization. The new SmartX ECP cluster now supports part of the internal network applications as well as the newly launched outpatient service systems. VMs hosting internal services were efficiently migrated to the SMTX OS cluster using the SMTX migration tool, with the hospital IT team completing the migration independently in a simple and streamlined process.
More Resources：SmartX vs Nutanix: Product and Performance Comparison, Migration Approaches and Use Cases
For more information on SmartX ECP, please visit our website and download SmartX ECP Product Portfolio Brief.
