Stoneworks Helps Canadian Community Hospital Streamline Operations with Innovative Hitachi Data Center Integration

A hospital modernization project expanded the capacity and patient services of Cornwall Community Hospital and presented the IT department with the unique opportunity to design and deploy a new data center. Stoneworks led the transformation, with a robust data infrastructure offers high availability, data protection, and virtualization to support life-critical systems.

  • October 31, 2023 | Author: Susan Biagi
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After embarking on a substantial modernization project, Cornwall Community Hospital in Eastern Ontario, Canada is a state-of-the-art medical facility and teaching hospital with 185 beds, 180 physicians, and 1,300 employees. In addition to improving patient care, the project included building a brand-new data center to support the hospital’s current and future needs.

With its mission-critical requirements, the new data center infrastructure would have to support high levels of availability, performance, privacy, scalability, and virtualization. The hospital’s IT director wanted a single-source solution throughout, from servers to hypervisor software.

Cornwall Community Hospital partnered with Stoneworks Technologies to design and build the right solution. Based in Ottawa, Canada, and recently acquired by Fulcrum IT Partners, Stoneworks specializes in data modernization. The IT services provider has a longstanding relationship with Hitachi Vantara and is a Hitachi TrueNorth Platinum Partner. Together, Stoneworks and Cornwall Community Hospital chose to work with Hitachi Vantara.

 

An end-to-end Hitachi storage solution

The new data center solution is based on Hitachi Vantara Compute Blades, Hitachi Unified Storage, and Hitachi Data Protection Suite with native connectivity to VMware vSphere. The Hitachi Vantara elements are integrated and provide a referenced architecture for VMware vSphere. The Hitachi Vantara storage platform is integrated with the vSphere API engine, enabling multiple VMware services to send workloads to the Hitachi Vantara storage controller, reducing network traffic and freeing up server resources for other critical tasks.

Cornwall deployed two Hitachi Vantara Compute Blade 2000 systems, with hybrid I/O and logical partitioning to support the high availability and adaptability required of mission-critical data centers. Each chassis comprises three E55R3 blades configured in a VMware vSphere cluster using ESX 5 to establish and run virtual machines.

A high dosage of availability

The Compute Blades connect to the Hitachi Vantara Unified Storage 150, which supports both block- and file-based storage access. It simplifies network management and features built-in redundancy to maintain always-on availability. The Unified Storage system supports all primary VMware storage, fosters virtual machine density, and consolidates VMware applications on a single platform for easier virtualization management.

Backups are handled via Hitachi Vantara Unified Storage 110 with the Hitachi Data Protection Suite. The system automatically adds virtualized servers and features Dynamic Tiering, which supports multiple storage tiers comprised of different types of data drives.

The full Hitachi solution provides Cornwall with 99.999 percent availability, regardless of the workload. The system is flexible and adaptable, both critical to support future growth, and it simplifies backup and recovery operations. In addition, the hospital IT staff has experienced improved system performance and reliability and has effectively eliminated downtime for system maintenance.

Learn more about Hitachi Global Solutions or Hitachi Vantara.

Find out more about Hitachi Vantara partner Stoneworks Technologies.

 

Image Credits: Stoneworks, Cornwall Community Hospital

 

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