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.
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.
Zhang Wujun, Director of Information and Data Center, FAH