A Century-Old Hospital's Path to IT Innovation: Accelerating Integration Platform Construction via SmartX ECP

In the process of advancing hospital informatization, The First People’s Hospital of Shunde completed the construction of basic information systems, such as HIS, and introduced an integration platform to establish a Clinical Data Repository (CDR). The integration platform also imposes new requirements on the IT infrastructure: the platform involves multiple servers, each requiring corresponding development and testing environments; as system calls rely on the integration platform, reliability requirements are extremely high; the integration platform of a large Class A tertiary hospital must process an average of 90 million messages per day, requiring peak processing capabilities of 1,000 TPS, where insufficient storage performance can easily lead to system-wide latency; furthermore, the introduction of the integration platform and digital applications involves extensive and continuous development and testing tasks, which traditional infrastructure cannot meet in terms of agility requirements.

During the IT infrastructure selection process for the integration platform, the hospital determined that the traditional path of physical servers and centralized storage presented challenges such as high construction costs, difficult disaster recovery implementation, and complex expansion. In contrast, Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) is software-centric and replaces proprietary hardware with standard commercial hardware, resolving management complexity and scalability issues. Furthermore, resource expansion is not limited by the hardware configuration of a single server; instead, continuous resource scaling and performance enhancement can be achieved by expanding the server cluster. Following a rigorous six-month POC and technical exchange with SmartX, the hospital gained a comprehensive understanding of the reliability and availability of SmartX ECP solutions and ultimately decided to partner with SmartX.

Integrating diverse requirements, The First People’s Hospital of Shunde ultimately opted for SmartX ECP, combining a hyper-converged platform with traditional architecture to build its integration platform. The hyper-converged platform consists of a 5-node Halo 7100L HCI appliance and two 10GbE switches, providing a unified resource pool to support the integration platform's production environment, development and testing environments, and integrated business workloads such as the LIS system. Concurrently, the integration platform's CDR database runs in a hot standby configuration on a traditional architecture of physical servers and SAN storage. After several years of use, SmartX ECP has expanded to support more application scenarios, including the integration platform’s ESB and CDR, the LIS, HR management system, CKD management systems (hemodialysis and peritoneal dialysis), ADR system, and BDS.