Healthcare Industry- Data centre migration case study

 

About the company

This company is a privately held conglomerate of hospitals based in the Greater San Gabriel Valley of California. This company oversees and manages over 1,200 beds at its seven acute care facilities and employs over 7,000 caregivers.

CHALLENGES

Lack of Storage and Inexperience with Data Center Migration

As a conglomerate of hospitals, they needed more support, as their data center was reaching maximum capacity. The organization had a data center located at one address, which needed to be much larger to support the growing business, network infrastructure, software, and applications. With an enhanced data center, it would help with the growing business and help them meet these solutions to meet the data center requirements of these different elements of their business. However, this company recognized early on that they were going to need help with this data center migration initiative since they did not have staff with experience in such a large-scale consolidation and migration project from both a project management and technical standpoint.

With a need for minimal downtime due to the availability requirements, treating patients, and the day-to-day operations of the hospital staff, they quickly realized that they would have to seek help from PM2NET to migrate the current data center to a larger facility at a nearby hospital location. 

Assessment and solution

PM2NET created a scope of work, a project plan, an implementation plan, and a test plan. PM2NET completed the implementation scope, moved the new data center into production, tested and supported the hospital during the activation of this new datacenter, as well as the decommissioning of the old data center.

From a technical standpoint, the list of the service categories that were affected by this datacenter migration project include the following:

  • Application

  • Backup

  • Billing

  • Case Management

  • Connectivity

  • Data/Application

  • DHCP

  • DNS

  • Domain Controller

  • Exchange

  • Finance

  • Footprints

  • Hospital application

  • Monitoring

  • Phone

  • Security

  • Services 

  • Storage

  • Test 

  • VMWARE

  • VPN Service

  • Web filtering

  • Web Service

  • Wireless

Every single one of these services had a staff member assigned in charge of testing the related applications on the new datacenter, which served multiple locations. This enabled the organization to see which elements were negatively affected from the data center migration. 

advantages

By putting their trust in PM2NET’s expertise, the conglomerate of hospitals received a complete end-to-end solution, including the support required to migrate a data center within a sensitive hospital environment that had 24/7 uptime required. Although this was a very complex move, it was accomplished on time, met minimal downtime requirements, and ended with just a few minor items that needed further attention.

The new network architecture has provided the hospital chain with a highly available solution that utilizes available bandwidth and resources efficiently and fairly, without degradation or slowdowns to the quality of critical systems. In fact, these critical systems performed more optimally with the new datacenter.