INDUSTRY CHALLENGE
The performance and availability of a healthcare data center are crucial for day-to-day operations and the future business of healthcare. The changing regulatory landscape, the transformative use of technology, staff increases, larger pools of insured persons, mergers and acquisitions, and an aging population are driving the need for world-class data access, compute, and storage. One of the top healthcare systems in the country set out to build a new primary data center to provide the best technology infrastructure and services possible for their thriving health system.
APPROACH
Building a new data center was one of the most significant technology-related capital investment projects the organization tackled in recent years. The current data center located in the medical center was landlocked and did not provide capacity for expansion. Also, the need for a disaster recovery/business continuity site was a must for the organization's highly dependent technology business. The information technology leadership team did extensive research and analysis to cost compare moving the data center to a third-party colocation provider vs. building a new data center near their headquarters. A former facility owned by the health system was available for renovation and would be used to compare costs and solutions.
Technology is critical in supporting the health system's goals and objectives. It was imperative that the team create a long-term data center strategy driven by the top-level organizational requirements and the increasing needs of user groups and stakeholders across the clinical, staff, and research organizations in the hospital. The information technology team developed a detailed roadmap of their technology profile and the strategy they would use to facilitate both technology growth and the importance of the data center in hospital operations. This profile was used to conduct the ‘build vs. buy’ evaluation with colocation providers. After an extensive evaluation of colocation options, the team made the recommendation to leadership to build a new primary data center.
The evaluation items key to the decision were as follows:
Costs
Since the system has significant growth plans, the long-term costs would continue to escalate year over year. Building ownership also helped the evaluation and having their dark fiber 100% under their control also helped with long-term costs.
Latency
When the sharing of electronic information is vital to patient health, every millisecond of transmission time counts. The best return times charted with the colocation providers were six milliseconds, and the health system could maintain four milliseconds in their current environment.
Cooling & Density
There were also concerns that the available colocation sites would have challenges with cooling and the struggle to support the high-density requirements. Upon approval, the health system's team issued a Request for Proposal (RFP) for data center professional services and engaged with LEDG to help design and build the new data center.
RESULTS
The health systems new high-performance, fully replicated data center uses an innovative N+1 redundancy approach to make sure the data center is 100% prepared for organizational growth, technology advancements, exponential demand for speed and storage capacity, and disaster recovery.Since most of growing health system is running mission-critical applications, the team created an Active-Active data center architecture. An Active-Active data center architecture provides asynchronous replication of critical applications between both data center sites. For the headquarter location, this includes the newly constructed data center and the other existing data center at the medical facility. Through the utilization of dark fiber between the sites and the active-active architecture, critical applications are 100% available and able to run at any given time with access to a replicated database. Data can flow between two locations enabling better load balancing and automatic fail-over if one location should become unavailable. As an example, the organization runs EPIC on one data center for six months and switches it to the alternative production data center. This strategy keeps systems running at top performance and allows for testing the impact on users and uptime of switching the EPIC instance between data center sites. The examples of this impact were clear; before the second data center was built, if EPIC went down all outpatient visits and unplanned surgeries stopped until the system was recovered. Now, by combining asynchronous replication between data centers with Active-Active applications, the N+1 redundancy approach provides continuously available computing and peace of mind. Though the organization is expanding locations and technology use through new affiliations, the footprint of the high-density data center is now reduced due to smart use of virtualization and a hyper-converged IT infrastructure. The new data center design employed a pod-based strategy with hot aisle containment with power and cooling infrastructure capable of supporting high-rack densities. At lower loads, the cooling system was designed to ramp down to meet actual demand, maximizing the energy efficiency of the data center operation.
Also, the data center infrastructure management (DCIM) system provides visibility into the current state of the data center infrastructure. When the team is presented with new technology requirements, they can look at the expected demands and choose the right data center location for maximum performance without additional physical space. Organizational expansion has also increased user storage needs by 30%, and the team sees continued demand to increase the speed to transmit vital diagnostic data from radiology and laboratories. The new high-density infrastructure enables the D-H technology team to meet business requirements and provide high-performance, scalable technology services to the entire healthcare organization.
LEDG Data Center Planning and Design Services Helps Achieve Success
LEDG provided a wide array of advisory and data center design services for the multi-year data center project. Services included:
Patient rooms of the future, digital health, and integrated operational and medical systems along with continued collaborations and affiliations will continue to increase the demand for fast, reliable computing no matter the data is generated. Today, this growth health systems information technology team and the new data center infrastructure is poised for what the future of healthcare holds for the organization.