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, 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 achieving disaster recovery (DR) across multiple campuses, supporting hospital-specific applications such as integration platforms and PACS, advancing cloud-native transformation, and migrating from public cloud to on-premises platforms.
>>More use cases: SmartX ECP in Healthcare: Running Core Systems and Databases, Replacing VMware and Nutanix
#3 Achieving DR Across Multiple Campuses
To help healthcare institutions enhance availability for critical services, SmartX ECP possesses capabilities to meet different levels of DR requirements. These solutions improve infrastructure reliability through various approaches, including active-active architecture, asynchronous DR, data backup and restoration, database DR reinforcement, and public cloud database DR.
Learn more:
Three Manufacturing Customers Share Their Insights on SmartX HCI Disaster Recovery Solutions
How to Lower the Overall Cost and Management Complexity of Oracle Disaster Recovery?
Putian First People’s Hospital: Phased Active-Active Data Center Deployment with On-Demand Procurement
Putian First People’s Hospital initially supported core application systems such as HIS using a combination of physical servers with HA clustering and traditional virtualization with active-active storage. Aiming to enhance the availability of its electronic medical record (EMR) system, the hospital planned to adopt an active-active architecture. However, given the high cost of active-active storage, the hospital followed a budget-conscious, phased approach: first using SMTX OS’s rack-awareness feature to place data replicas in separate server rooms, simulating active-active protection. In future phases, the hospital will gradually complete the full active-active cluster through expansion.
Currently, a 14-node ECP cluster has been deployed across two server rooms within the same campus, supporting all business systems and databases except the HIS database, improving availability while reducing DR costs.
Nanyang Central Hospital: Supporting Core Systems in DMZ and Internal Networks with SMTX Backup & DR for Data Protection
To meet higher EMR evaluation requirements, Nanyang Central Hospital planned to modernize the IT infrastructure of its older campus. After recognizing the ease of use and stability of SmartX ECP, the hospital adopted SmartX ELF virtualization to support critical and general business systems, including HIS, EMR, integration platform, LIS, anesthesia, and intensive care systems.
To ensure data protection, key business VMs are backed up to external NAS storage using SMTX backup and DR, enabling recovery in case of VM failure. SmartX ECP not only delivers high performance and stability for core systems like HIS, EMR, and the integration platform but also enhances data reliability through efficient backups, laying a solid foundation for future active-active architecture deployment.
Foshan Women and Children Hospital: Builds Oracle DR Resource Pool to Reduce Costs and Improve Efficiency for Dev/Test and Core Applications
Foshan Women and Children Hospital originally used a traditional three-tier architecture based on centralized storage, which not only led to performance bottlenecks but also resulted in high power consumption and elevated overall operating costs. Since 2019, the hospital has adopted a VMware + SMTX OS integrated deployment solution, gradually migrating systems such as PACS, critical care, maternal and child care, RIS, and DRGs. At the same time, the hospital built an Oracle DR resource pool and leveraged fast cloning technology to quickly generate Dev/Test databases for core systems like HIS and EMR, reducing the time from 20–30 minutes to just 1–2 minutes. This significantly improved Dev/Test efficiency while lowering overall system operating costs.
Learn more: Hyperconvergence: A CIO’s Secret of Hospital Digital Transformation
Guangzhou Yuexiu District Children’s Hospital: Active-Active Backup Between On-Prem and Public-Cloud Databases Achieves “RPO = 0, RTO < 30 Minutes” DR Protection
Guangzhou Yuexiu District Children’s Hospital adopts a hybrid architecture of public cloud with on-prem HCI to support its production systems deployed in the public cloud. Using Oracle Data Guard (DG), the primary Oracle database on the public cloud continuously synchronizes data to the Oracle standby database on the ECP platform, forming an active-active setup between public cloud and on-prem environments. This architecture delivers disaster recovery capabilities with RPO = 0 and RTO < 30 minutes (local HIS system takeover time), ensuring rapid recovery and business continuity even in the event of cloud platform or network failures.
#4 Advancing Cloud-Native Transformation
As hospital business systems continue to expand, the scalability of IT infrastructure and the agility of resource delivery are becoming critical factors limiting the rapid development of healthcare IT systems. In response, many organizations have started containerizing their applications based on cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes. By leveraging SmartX ECP together with the SMTX Kubernetes Service, they are able to consolidate IT resources and achieve unified management of both virtualized and containerized environments.
For more details, please read: SmartX VCCI Solution Upgrade: Securing the Interconnection Between Virtualized and Containerized Applications
Zigong First People’s Hospital: SMTX OS + SKS Power Containerized Applications and Enable Unified Management of Virtualized and Container Environments
Zigong First People’s Hospital faced dual challenges of FC SAN switch bottlenecks and high hardware investment while modernizing its traditional VMware-based infrastructure to meet domestic IT innovation requirements.
To achieve this transformation cost-effectively, the hospital adopted a “cloud-native + domestic HCI” strategy: it first containerized applications based on the openEuler OS, then introduced SmartX ECP (paired with ELF and SMTX Kubernetes Service) to build an ECP cluster on Hygon C86 servers. The virtualized environment supports database systems, while HIS, EMR, and other business applications run in the containerized environment. Both environments are centrally managed through SKS, with a flat network architecture ensuring seamless connectivity between VMs and containers. This project helped the hospital achieve a deep cloud-native transition, improve resource efficiency and network performance, and reduce operational complexity.
Learn more: From VMware to SmartX ECP: The Cloud Native Journey of Zigong First People’s Hospital
#5 Migrating From Public Cloud to On-Premises Platforms
In response to the rapid development of the healthcare cloud, some medical institutions have moved to the public cloud in recent years. However, after a period of use, many began to encounter challenges such as inconvenient operations, high usage and expansion costs. As a result, they are now considering a return to on-premises environments and are seeking a stable and reliable “public-cloud-exit” solution. To address this need, SMTX CloudMove enables efficient and seamless migration of hosts from physical machines, public cloud, or other virtualization platforms to SmartX ECP.
The First Affiliated Hospital of Baotou Medical University: Exit Public Cloud in Phases to SmartX ECP
The First Affiliated Hospital of Baotou Medical University initially deployed some of its business systems on the public cloud, which proved to be costly and difficult to manage. Meanwhile, its aging on-premises data center was experiencing significant performance bottlenecks. To address these challenges, the hospital adopted SmartX ECP appliances and carried out a two-phase project to modernize its local data center and exit from the public cloud:
- In the first phase, the hospital built a SmartX ECP cluster in its local data center to host part of its production systems, validating the performance and stability of the hyperconverged architecture.
- In the second phase, the hospital expanded the ECP cluster to migrate business VMs from the public cloud, reducing the risks of cloud exit while improving overall cost efficiency.
At present, the hospital has adopted SmartX ECP to support all business systems except HIS and PACS, including EMR, LIS, mobile nursing, HRP, infection control, emergency services, and more.
#6 Tailored Solutions for Healthcare Applications
Provide High-Performance, Highly Reliable Support for Healthcare Integration Platforms
As a critical system in hospital interoperability evaluations, the healthcare integration platform processes a massive volume of messages daily. To ensure processing efficiency and message integrity, it requires a high-performance, highly reliable IT infrastructure.
Today, many hospitals have adopted SmartX ECP to support their integration platforms and have validated the performance of engines like Rhapsody and Odin within the ECP environment.
In the x86-server environment, SmartX ECP supports up to 680,000 messages per minute per Rhapsody engine, with cluster-level throughput reaching a stable 640,000 messages per minute — 5 to 10 times the capacity typically required at general tertiary hospitals.
To learn more, please refer to:SmartX x Lyniate Rhapsody: Boost Healthcare Integration Engine’s Performance on HCI Platform
In testing with the Odin integration engine, SmartX ECP demonstrated an interconnect simulation throughput exceeding 18,000 TPS per node, with ETL processing of 3 million records completed in just 5 minutes and 34 seconds, significantly boosting the data processing capability of hospital integration platforms. Additionally, during DR testing, Odin achieved failover in only 3 seconds, effectively ensuring business continuity.
Integrated Platform of Distributed Storage and Applications: Balancing PACS Performance, Capacity, and Cost
Due to the specific requirements of PACS workloads, many healthcare institutions often need to purchase compute and storage resources separately and deploy two sets of storage systems for online and nearline data to meet both high-performance and performance-capacity balanced storage needs. However, such an approach leads to high costs, complex management, and limited scalability as data volumes grow.
To address these challenges, SmartX offers an integrated platform that combines distributed storage with compute resources. This solution supports both virtualized and containerized workloads within a single system while providing high-performance storage as well as performance-capacity balanced storage. It reduces investment in compute nodes, storage hardware costs, and overall IT infrastructure complexity — empowering healthcare institutions to scale with agility.
To learn more, please refer to: SMTX File Storage in HCI 6.0: Providing Diverse Data Storage Services with One Platform
For more information on SmartX ECP, please visit our website and download SmartX ECP Product Portfolio Brief.
