IT Infrastructure Transformation Practices of the Leading National Tertiary Public Hospital in South China

The first affiliated hospital serves up to 18,000 outpatients daily at its main campus and operates multiple branch campuses, including Dongshan and Huangpu. The IT infrastructure for both the main and branch campuses is centrally planned by the main hospital. The hospital has established several IT infrastructure resource pools, including a core database resource pool, a virtualization resource pool, and an imaging resource pool. With the advancement of smart healthcare, there are plans to expand the application scenarios of the virtualization resource pool. Due to the substantial and rapidly growing demand for IT infrastructure resources, the active-active centralized storage solution faces high expansion costs and long implementation cycles, making it difficult to meet requirements for rapid service deployment. Furthermore, the private cloud construction solution involves extensive business downtime for migration, which fails to meet business continuity requirements and introduces compatibility verification issues.

Based on clinical business requirements, The first affiliated hospital sought an infrastructure capable of achieving investment-on-demand and rapid deployment to support the continuous innovation of information systems. The goals included simplifying operations to reduce maintenance pressure while lowering procurement costs. After comparative testing, the hospital concluded that the hyper-converged infrastructure is simple, user-friendly, and elastically scalable. It enables timely responses to sudden business demands and rapid service rollouts. In terms of cost, the replacement of proprietary hardware with general-purpose hardware increases flexibility in selection and keeps costs relatively controllable. These characteristics effectively satisfy the hospital's business requirements.

Based on this, the first affiliated hospital deployed nearly 30 nodes of SMTX Halo hyper-converged infrastructure appliances to run hundreds of production virtual machines. Leveraging the SmartX ECP, more than 300 virtual machines have been gradually deployed to support multiple application scenarios, including DICOM Grid integration platform ESB servers, DICOMGrid PACS applications, HIS applications, critical care systems, internet hospital, administration, scientific research, and teaching. This has significantly enhanced the level of IT cloudification and clinical service efficiency, empowering the construction of a smart hospital. Benefiting from the excellent compatibility of SmartX ECP, the first affiliated hospital can achieve unified management of multiple clusters through VMware vCenter, which aligns with existing usage habits and improves management and operation and maintenance efficiency.