St Andrews Toowoomba Hospital (SATH) is a non-profit private hospital and registered charity. Equipped with 137 beds for intensive care for cancer treatment, as well as a support clinic,. With over 500 staff requiring access to EPAS for the hospital to operate, the system is crucial to provide the vertical applications necessary with real-time information to allow the doctors, surgeons, and nurses to treat the patients. The IT system for SATH is known as Enterprise Patient Administration Support (EPAS).

SATH contacted DiGiCOR with their intention to improve the current hospital’s IT infrastructure and future-proof its disaster recovery system. The main concern for SATA is to upgrade the use of backup, archive, and quick data recovery for several critical applications.

DiGiCOR always puts our clients’ needs in mind, and we found two main challenges with the EPAS system. Firstly, if a failure of the primary storage occurred, the system would rely on backup. This, however, resulted in some downtime and a subsequent drop in performance due to less bandwidth. This drop in performance would hurt the hospital’s ability to provide patient care. As the process of recovering is manual, it also involves staff interaction to rectify. Depending on the actual failure, it could be hours or days before the problem could be resolved.

Furthermore, the most immediate concern for SATH was having their storage and server nodes replaced, as they are currently aging and run without vendor support. From these two concerns, it was made clear from SATH that system uptime, system stability, support, and cost were all crucial factors that needed addressing in the solution.

We defined and discussed a custom-tailored solution with SATH and decided to divide the solution into two phases. The first phase was designed to rectify the poor back up. Digicor supplied vendor-certified hardware and the correct vendor license to be able to implement a high availability/failover scenario using SAN storage, along with a support contract to alleviate all the main issues in the first challenge.
In the second phase, we replaced the outdated nodes for SATH. DiGiCOR used Citrix XEN hypervisor hardware and Microsoft operating systems as they are the most cost effective in terms of the whole project overview. This is due to the staff being familiar with the system. Switching to other vendors would also involve additional costs for staff training and migration.

The solution saves SATH both time and money. It provides an easier-to-use solution than other competitors, along with extensive savings. In addition, DiGiCOR has ensured the hospital is not locked into buying more expensive products from a particular vendor or paying unnecessary markups for standard features by utilizing NexentaStor, which is based on open-source technology. Besides, ZFS offers massively scalable storage environments with high granularity of data protection.

Furthermore, NexentaStor offers massively scalable storage environments with a virtually unlimited number of snapshots, free versioning, and high granularity of data protection. DiGiCOR’s use of NexentaStor’s ZFS technology delivered the scalability scale point required to meet all of SATH’s future storage requirements.

As a result, DiGiCOR allowed SATH to maximise its return on storage investment with increased performance, improved data backup and recovery, and hardware-agnostic solutions. This thereby allows the company to leverage the new nodes.