Gujarat’s Largest Public Hospital Chooses HPE SimpliVity to host its Mission-Critical Applications

Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Platform stood out from competitors due to its consistent performance, out of the box backup, DR, data protection and optimization capabilities

Gujarat recently took one of the biggest leaps in healthcare in the country. In Mid-Jan 2019, PM Shri Narendra Modi inaugurated Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Institute of Medical Science and Research (SVPIMSR) in Ahmedabad to offer cheap and high-quality healthcare to all. Setup by the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC), the 78-meter high facility will be the city’s tallest infrastructure, with 18 floors, 1500 beds, 32 OTs, and 139 ICUs to name a few. A hospital of this size and scale requires a highly efficient, reliable, and secure IT infrastructure to manage its patient records, Hospital ERP, users, and other applications. After a stringent evaluation, AMC chose HPE SimpliVity Hyper-Converged Infrastructure platform and Ahmedabad based Dotcad Pvt. Ltd. for the solution design and implementation.

The Need to Ensure Hospital’s Seamless Functioning

To enable SVPIMSR’s smooth functioning, AMC needed a platform to host the hospital’s mission critical applications, comprising of a hospital management ERP, Virtual desktop environment (VDI), entire Active directory, LDAP, DNS, DHCP servers, Anti-Virus server, patching server & more.

“We want the hospital to be completely paperless and filmless from day one, where doctors and nursing staff would use tablets and other mobile devices for their healthcare work. To enable this, we needed an IT infrastructure that would offer seamless data protection, consistent performance, high resiliency, and easy to manage”

- Shri Vijay Nehra, IAS. Municipal Commissioner, Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation

This was needed to provide secure desktops for 1000+ doctors, nurses, and administrative staff. Here again, the solution had to be able to cater to a lot of requirements that are unique to hospitals. For instance, in a virtualized hospital environment, the management, doctors, and nurses would need access the Virtual environment that would work seamlessly and would not throw up errors, be it driver related & incompatible environments. This is a basic requirement from a Virtual Desktop Environment in that it should be able to handle existing and future VDI based workloads.

“The best part of HPE SimpliVity is the way it can scale out, so from a non-disruptive scalability perspective, it’s probably one of the best I have seen. It was a hands down winner. The platform’s benchmark results are fantastic as compared to others.”

—Shri Ashish Raja, OSD. Sardar Vallabhbhai Institute of Medical Sciences & Research

With so many mission critical applications and so many other workloads, a fundamental requirement of AMC was for the system to be resilient enough to offer better uptime. Second, it had to have data protection capabilities to quickly recover from data loss. Third, it had to deliver consistent performance that would not degrade over time. The fourth and last key requirement was for the system to be DR-ready for future implementation.

“SVPIMSR needed a high-performing and scalable IT infrastructure that would take care of the hospital’s needs for years to come. HPE’s Simplivity fit the bill perfectly with its consistent performance, built-in data protection, and scalability”,

--Joybrata Mukherjee, Director - Channel, SI, Alliances and Service Providers, HPE India

HPE Simplivity is the Hands-Down Choice for Simplifying IT Infrastructure

After detailed discussions with numerous vendors, AMC chose HPE Simplivity as the HCI (Hyper-Convergence Infrastructure) platform. HCI is the latest data center architecture that combines storage, compute, and networking into a single system. It helps reduce complexity, power and space requirements, which in turn help improve management and save cost since there are fewer components to manage.

“We’re a Platinum HPE partner with ample experience in implementing state-of-the-art solutions for hospitals. We manage approx. 6000-7,000 VDI seats in the Gujarat state. HPE Simplivity to handle the IT infrastructure, and our ability to deliver successful solutions for hospitals, were the key factors that gave AMC a lot of confidence in choosing Dotcad to do the implementation” said Shaishav Singh, Managing Director, Dotcad.

It took 5 months of hectic work to build the entire IT system, including the connectivity and applications. HPE SimpliVity was a clear choice for the IT infrastructure because it has been designed from ground up for such hospital requirements. The platform can do inline data de-duplication, optimization, and compression on all the data right at inception, which can help organisations achieve 40:1 data efficiency across all storage including backups.

“The system also provides out of the box RAID + RAIN protection, which enable native data protection, business continuity, and disaster recovery capabilities without the need for any special-purpose backup and recovery hardware or software. It’s the only product that guarantees restoration of a 1 TB Virtual Machine in just 60 seconds”, said Joybrata Mukherjee, Director - Channel, SI, Alliances and Service Providers, HPE India

It’s a recoverable backup that’s an integrated part of the system. On top of that, the system has global unified management capabilities that enable IT to manage all resources and workloads centrally using familiar interfaces like VMware vCenter.

HPE SimpliVity is a key building block of the hospital’s IT infrastructure. Besides this, the hospital also implemented quite a few other interesting IT innovations. These include a digitally enabled, IoT building that integrates every single hospital service into a single command and console center this will show everything from energy utilization to ICUs, revenue per bed per department, pharmacy, or even the number of cases of dengue being handled.

“A highly advanced queue management system is also being implemented to ensure smooth flow of the average 3000-4000 footfalls expected per day in the SVPIMSR’s OPD”

--Shri Kuldeep Arya, IAS. Dy Comissioner, Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation

The basic system is already available and the hospital has started taking in patients. The hospital is also setting up a completely voice enabled system, which is currently being tested. RFID enabled equipment and instruments are also expected to be implemented in the operation theatres.

Ready for Superior Patient Care Now and the Future

The HCI platform with its inherent data protection capabilities enables the hospital to stay compliant with stringent healthcare norms because all critical healthcare systems are well protected.

On top of that, being a hyper-converged infrastructure platform, it would result in considerable cost-savings in terms of power and space. The entire solution would be delivered in less than 30 Rack Units, and it also allows the management of all applications, including backup, DR, etc. from a single console, which further brings down the administrative overheads considerably.

The system is also highly scalable allowing it to take on more workloads in the future. Currently, the hospital is running around 500 beds on HPE Simplivity, but the solution is tuned to handle the entire load of 1500 beds as and when they are added with minimal increase in infrastructure. Its architecture is such that it can scale beyond that as well when required without any problems. The hospital also plans to host a remote DR site for the mission critical Applications in about years’ time, which could be easily taken care of by built-in DR capabilities.

A state-of-the-art infrastructure of this level has enabled SVPIMSR to function seamlessly for years to come. With the HCI solution in place, the hospital doesn’t have to worry about its data center pains. The only pains they have to worry about are those of their patients, which the hospital will surely be able to alleviate thanks to a superior IT infrastructure to run their mission critical applications. The marquee project has probably become a benchmark for all other hospitals to follow.