The First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University (FAH) was founded in 1910 as a public hospital attached to Guangdong Public Institution of Medicine. Today, FAH has developed into a leading modernized Grade 3A comprehensive hospital in China. It ranked sixth in the country and first in the South China region in the Chinese Hospital Rankings released by Fudan University in both 2018 and 2019.

We've deployed SmartX's hyperconverged products for over a year, and they have been running with great stability. They not only helped us save space in the server room, but also made the work of the operation & maintenance staff a lot easier. Besides, SmartX provides maintenance service with timely responses. I’m sure we will have more businesses running on SmartX's hyperconverged architecture in the future.
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Zhang Wujun, Director of Information and Data Center, FAH

Challenges

FAH receives 18,000 outpatient visits per day and has multiple branches. The IT infrastructures of the headquarters and branch hospitals are all planned by the headquarters. Therefore, FAH's resource demands in IT infrastructure are large in volume and increasing rapidly. Previously, the hospital had adopted virtualization technology to solve the problems of limited space in the server room. It also helped to improve resource utilization and reduce the difficulty of operation & maintenance. However, the hospital still struggled with the rapidly changing resource demands. The main challenges are as follows:

The hospital used active/active centralized storage to provide storage resources for server virtualization. However, due to high expansion costs, complex bidding process and long implementation cycle for projects, this solution was unable to meet the requirements of rapid launch of business resources.

The hospital considered building a private cloud, but this would result in the downtime during the migration. It could not meet the hospital's requirement of business continuity, and even cause new problems of compatibility verification.

Architecture
Highlights
SmartX HCI supports multiple virtualization platforms and can be managed together with traditional virtualization and HCI from other vendors
The hospital's system could run stably for a long period even if the storage utilization rate exceeds 90%
Results
13 SMTX Halo Appliances support over 100 production VMs and provide over 300TB storage, efficiently reducing the investment on virtualized resource pools.
Provide resource pools that support a wide range of systems including integrated platforms, EMR, PACS, HIS, etc.
Considerably save space for server room and simplify operation & maintenance
Scenarios
Virtualized resource pool scale-out for integrated platforms, EMR, PACS, HIS, etc.
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