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DataCore Software, a provider of storage virtualisation SAN software, has announced that St Marien Amberg Hospital, a German teaching hospital, has implemented SANmelody to support its information systems and PACS (picture archiving and communication system) project running on a VMware environment.
The virtual infrastructure not only offers high availability, better performance and lower management costs, but also halves the electricity and cooling costs by using less hardware to do more work.
“By using a combination of DataCore storage and VMware server virtualisation, we have laid the foundation for an IT environment of the future,” said Dr Dietmar Braeuer, head of information technology at St Marien Amberg Hospital. “More flexibility, more functionality and performance, less hardware.”
St Marien Amberg Hospital is a large community and teaching hospital in Amberg, Germany. A 12-person IT team administrates approximately 650 workstations used by 1,300 members of staff.
The hospital operates around-the-clock, so constant access to patient data must be guaranteed – with archiving periods lasting up to 30 years. The increasing digitalisation of patient and administrative data puts tremendous pressure on managing data. With tight public sector budgets, this posed a real challenge.
To increase flexibility and to optimise the utilisation of resources, the hospital decided to use virtual servers running under VMware for the PACS project. For shared storage, St Marien Amberg Hospital evaluated and selected DataCore’s SANmelody.
The DataCore storage servers supply 35 virtual machines with the PACS archive, a backup server, various file and database servers for the management information system (MIS) and several web applications with high-availability storage capacity.
DataCore’s Thin Provisioning is used for the dynamic and automatic allocation of virtual disks, meaning that up to 95 percent of the existing storage capacity can be used before additional disk drives have to be allocated – resulting in less hardware required, reduced maintenance and lowered energy consumption. As a result, costs dropped by 50% in the computer centre.
