Austrian Health Care Provider Deploys Cisco UCS

Cisco Systems, Inc. announced that Klinikum Wels-Grieskirchen, healthcare provider in upper Austria, has deployed the Cisco Unified Computing System solution in its data center.

Serving two hospitals, 240 general practitioners and 600,000 patients, the Cisco solution will serve as a hosting aggregation point for the region’s existing Cisco Medical Data Exchange Solution (MDES), a platform for sharing medical records online, and will host all of the region’s other applications and data. The decision to migrate to the Cisco Unified Computing System platform was made together with x-tention Informationstechnologie, to whom the Klinikum has outsourced its information technology operations since 2001 in order to simplify data center management while reducing operational costs and improving the Klinikum’s IT scalability.

Klinikum Wels-Grieskirchen is one of Austria’s largest medical regions, supported by a staff of more than 400 doctors and 1,200 nurses. The Klinikum’s IT infrastructure has been outsourced to x-tention, a company that specializes in supporting the health care sector, for more than eight years. This latest implementation of the Cisco Unified Computing System is part of an ongoing relationship between Cisco and x-tention, which also installed the Cisco MDES at Klinikum Wels-Grieskirchen in 2008. The deployment builds on the previous innovations of the MDES platform whereby all of the Klinikum’s data, such as medical records, X-rays and the like were made accessible to everyone who needs them across the region’s hospitals, nursing homes, home care facilities and general practitioners’ surgeries, significantly improving the quality and speed of decision making, diagnosis and patient care.

All of the Klinikum’s existing applications and data, including the Cisco MDES and Citrix platform, have been migrated to the Cisco Unified Computing System in order to deploy the MDES platform to new more sites quickly, meet the Klinikum’s rapidly increasing storage needs, reduce operational costs and improve overall system performance. This deployment represents the first time x-tention has used the Cisco Unified Computing System in one of its data centers.

At Klinikum Wels-Grieskirchen, the Cisco Unified Computing System is configured with two chassis, eight server blades and four Cisco 6120 fabric interconnects.

The standards-based Cisco Unified Computing System, which unites network, computational, storage access and virtualization into a single cohesive system, has integrated with the existing environment of Cisco routers and switches, third-party equipment and software, and VMware virtualization technology.

The decision to move to Cisco Unified Computing System was driven largely by the Klinikum’s growing data-storage requirements, which are increasing by 60 percent every year (data requirements in 2009 were 800 terabytes). The Klinikum needed a platform that could scale quickly and easily as its requirements changed.

The project saw x-tention migrate the largest of its three existing data centers, which currently runs over 150 VMware virtualized servers for a number of health care regions in Austria (including Klinikum Wels-Grieskirchen), to the Cisco Unified Computing System platform. Following the success of the current deployment, x-tention plans to migrate its other data centers to the Cisco platform.

Technology and Business Benefits

Cost Savings:

• Increased server utilization: The Klinikum’s primary application for cross-regional health-data exchange, the Cisco MDES, now accounts for only 10 percent of the data center’s system resources.
• Scalability: The existing Cisco Unified Computing System platform can support up to 72 blade servers within its current configuration. The Klinikum requires just eight servers to operate today. To add resources to the environment, the IT engineers just have to put in another blade into the chassis. Prior to the installation of the Cisco Unified Computing System, any additional servers could take up to one month to be deployed because additional power had to be installed by the local electricity provider.
• Cooling: The deployment of the Cisco Unified Computing System has led to a 30 percent reduction in data center cooling costs.
• Simplified cable management: With a unified fabric design and integrated network and storage access, the new Cisco Unified Computing System deployment uses 66 percent less cabling.

Simplified Management:

• By using the Cisco UCS Manager service profiles, x-tention can provision new VMware virtual servers in half the time, from a whole day to just a few hours.
• Network, application and server layers are all managed within a single management console, reducing the number of consoles from six (three local area networks and three servers) to just one.
• Simplifying the ongoing management of servers and remote users, as well as streamlining the deployment of new services, has significantly reduced day-to-day operational costs.

High Performance:

• The new Cisco Unified Computing System platform is twice as fast as the previous rack-mount server configuration.

Harald Waibel, x-tention, said: "Having worked with Cisco for a number of years on different projects, including the MDES deployment for Klinikum Wels-Grieskirchen in 2008, we were curious about the claims made by the Unified Computing System. Now that the system is fully deployed in our data center, we are thoroughly impressed. Every single benefit that Cisco promised has been achieved, from drastically improving server utilization and scalability, to simplifying server management and reducing operational costs. We have been so impressed with the Cisco Unified Computing System platform that we recommend it for all our customers’ data centers."

Elmar Flamme, CIO, Klinikum Wels-Grieskirchen, said: "Combining the Cisco Unified Computing System with our existing Cisco MDES platform has directly improved the care we are able to deliver to our patients. While MDES first revolutionized our service by making all medical information readily available across all sites, the Cisco Unified Computing System has taken the service to the next level by allowing all these services to be deployed and managed in new sites quickly and easily, while significantly improving the performance of all applications. Additionally, it significantly reduces the maintenance and life cycle refresh costs of our data center, as well as making service provision much more efficient."