Cliniques Universitaires Saint-Luc is the largest hospital in Brussels, Belgium. As the partner of the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL), Saint-Luc is the first European hospital to be globally recognized for its clinical research, making it one of the top hospitals in Europe, alongside the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, England.

According to the World Bank, Belgium has 3 doctors per 1,000 inhabitants, slightly higher than the 2.5 doctors per 1,000 inhabitants in the U.S. and 1.5 in China. Hospitals in Belgium provide the best healthcare and nursing services to its citizens, supported by a number of dedicated healthcare centers and world-renowned medical teams.

Business benefits

• 

  500%

  improvement in application performance

• 

  50%

  drop in O&M costs for storage equipment

• 

  24/7

  reliability assurances keep critical services up
  and running around the clock

Business Challenges

Saint-Luc attaches great importance to teaching and research and is committed to providing patients with reliable and convenient healthcare services as well as state-of-the-art medical technologies. The hospital wants its doctors to spend more time with their patients, shorten the time it takes to search through medical records, and facilitate the access to and searching of research reports.

Transformation

The volume of data on the unified information platform at Saint-Luc is increasing by over 20 percent each year. After deploying Huawei’s storage solution, employee access to IT systems was accelerated by 500 percent, while TCO dropped by over 50 percent. The solution ensures critical services remain up and running around the clock.

Breakthrough Improvements in Performance with Easy-to-use Features

Saint-Luc attaches great importance to teaching and research and is committed to providing patients with reliable and convenient healthcare services as well as state-of-the-art medical technologies. IT is playing an increasingly important role at the facility, where hospital operators have built a unified information platform that stores all clinical, administrative, and medical information. The sub-systems include databases, virtualization capabilities, file sharing, email, forensic video, office applications, and a long list of other utilities; however, the rapid growth in medical services has caused a slowdown in some of the service systems running on the platform. There was almost no storage space left. Adding to the dilemma were the old storage devices that were driving down performance levels and capacities. Many of these devices could also not be expanded. The older systems were unable to meet the growing storage needs at the data center.

Doctors should be able to spend as much time as possible with each patient. By helping doctors improve productivity in everything from calling up medical records to accessing medical images, Saint-Luc has been working towards making that a reality. To achieve their goal, the IT systems required faster response times, and the existing systems were proving to be more of a hindrance than anything else.

After comparing a large number of solutions from well-known vendors, the hospital ultimately selected Huawei’s end-to-end data storage solution. The complete solution includes everything from arrays and tiered storage to SSD accelerations, unified O&M, backup solutions, and Disaster Recovery (DR) programs. Huawei provided a tiered storage design to meet the varying application response requirements. The unified information platform, clinical research systems, databases, virtualization platforms, and other features all use high-end SAN storage. Adding in SSDs helped to sharply increase performance. Email, medical imaging, forensic video, and other elements are deployed on mid-range storage appliances, fully satisfying the requirements of structured and unstructured data. Deploying SmartQoS safeguards service performance at varying quality levels, increasing response speeds for some critical services by 500 percent. Doctors no longer have to wait for office computers to catch up with their service requests. They can now spend more time with their patients. This solution certainly turned out to be the right choice for the customer.

Huawei’s end-to-end data storage solution has a scale-out architecture expandable to eight controllers, 32 PB in capacity, and up to 800,000 IOPS in performance. The specifications are all first-rate. System performance increases linearly as more controllers are added. Also, the features and specifications of the OceanStor V3 storage appliances suit the building needs at Saint-Luc well. The hospital can now add and configure controllers as needed, so operators do not have to worry about performance degradation as systems are expanded in the future.

Maximizing the Value of Limited Resources

For years now, Saint-Luc has invested in IT, putting online one system after another. Due to technical constraints at the time, most of these systems were deployed in isolation, each with its own storage equipment. This has made the sharing of resources rather difficult. Adding to the problem is that equipment from different vendors has been deployed throughout the mix, making management extremely complicated. Huawei provided the hospital with inline de-duplication and compression functions that help reduce the required amount of storage media which, in turn, saves on cabinet space and lowers TCO.

Saint-Luc was also impressed by Huawei’s eSight management software, capable of managing storage devices, servers, and network switches in a unified manner. Everything can be done over one unified interface. Deploying BCManager disaster recovery software provides the hospital with full data protection assurances to safeguard applications, automate associated management processes, and provide a visualized view of the DR layout. eSight and BCManager have made equipment O&M and service management processes much simpler. Saint-Luc has been able to improve its management efficiencies across the board without having to add additional personnel.

Services Online All the Time

For most other industries, IT system failures and data loss would result in a loss of money. However, at hospitals, these same things can have potentially life-threatening consequences. With this in mind, Saint-Luc needed its systems to provide the best performance and reliability available.

As for service continuity at the hospital, Huawei provided an integrated SAN/NAS layout powered by its HyperMetro active-active solution. HyperMetro ensures the high availability of databases and file services, while in-solution mirroring capabilities help keep loads balanced. These, along with the ability to take over cross-center devices without interrupting services, ensure zero data loss and keep services up and running at all times. The hospital no longer must worry about stoppages in critical services. The solution also allows Saint-Luc to expand into a geo-redundant solution (three centers in two locations for superior DR protection) as they continue to expand their resources.

The Huawei solution has not only resolved the storage bottleneck, slow service response, problematic management, high TCO, high risk of service interruption, and other immediate issues that were pressing, but it has also been able to easily expand to suit future requirements. Huawei’s end-to-end solution benefited Saint-Luc in the following ways:

• 500 percent improvement in application performance

• 50 percent drop in O&M costs for storage equipment

• 24/7 reliability assurances keep critical services up and running around the clock

Huawei’s end-to-end storage solution ensures that data is readily available for hospital staff and physicians any time they need it, allowing personnel to spend more energy on providing high-quality healthcare services. The forward-looking design of the Huawei solution allows Saint-Luc to easily gear up to handle the growing volume of information.