GRN Gesundheitszentren Rhein-Neckar GmbH
The implementation of the product is very easy indeed. It requires less than a day from setting up DSM, the operating system, to configurating the storage system based on our specific requirements. Interestingly, server configuration takes even less time than getting server out of the box and installing the HDDs. Peter Kabelka, ITuK of the GRN GmbH
The Company
Based at Schwetzingen City of the Rhein-Neckar district, the Health Centers of GRN GmbH is a community of four hospitals with associated pharmacies, three geriatric rehabilitation clinics, and two senior care centers. Collectively, the GRN has more than 1,800 beds across all care facilities and employs approximately 3,000 staff in the Rhine-Neckar area.
The IT and Communications (ITuK) department is responsible for all technical support and maintenance of the IT infrastructure of GRN Care Centers and hospitals. The department contains a total of 17 full-time employees, who provides its users with extensive and diverse IT services. These include specific support and maintenance for over 1,300 PC workstations, 450 output management systems, and the effort in developing more than 150 applications and software packages. The ITuK's areas of expertise also include routine network service, server maintenance support, cluster solutions, Healthcare ERP solutions, and protocol support to its medical subsystems, an emphasized development of the ITuK. Based on years of IT experience within the hospital environment and clinical settings, the ITuK has also become a reliable service provider for external hospitals and doctors.
The IT and Communications (ITuK) department is responsible for all technical support and maintenance of the IT infrastructure of GRN Care Centers and hospitals. The department contains a total of 17 full-time employees, who provides its users with extensive and diverse IT services. These include specific support and maintenance for over 1,300 PC workstations, 450 output management systems, and the effort in developing more than 150 applications and software packages. The ITuK's areas of expertise also include routine network service, server maintenance support, cluster solutions, Healthcare ERP solutions, and protocol support to its medical subsystems, an emphasized development of the ITuK. Based on years of IT experience within the hospital environment and clinical settings, the ITuK has also become a reliable service provider for external hospitals and doctors.
The Challenge
Due to the decentralized structure of GRN's hospital facilities, to select a faster, more easily accessible and cost-effective storage was indeed necessary. It should discharge the SAN storage that was deployed by the ITuK with more intelligent solutions for backup systems and web services. The ITuK's has put great emphasis in pursuing a highly intuitive user interface for its storage system and log-in setup. Also, as substantial amount of users and facilities are accessing the system, the ITuK needs to make sure that log files of different tasks and operations are well-managed for examination and references.
The Solution
The Synology NAS server, RackStation RS3412xs, is a model that satisfies all the IT requirements of the ITuK. The RS3412xs impressively supports diverse protocols include iSCSI, NFS, CIFS, SMB, and the options to integrate into an existing Novell NDS tree via LDAP. What have been equally impressive are the potentials of the streamlined DSM storage management for hard drives, four LAN ports and the highly scalable storage capacity with expansion units. Currently, the RackStations are deployed in the existing network infrastructure with two network card bonding and two different VLAN networks. With dual gigabit connections supported, greater throughput is easily delivered for the VLAN infrastructure.
With the deployment of RS3412xs, the ESX environment of GRN is easily accessible with NFS connections and CIFS protocol for Windows clients. The NAS server also supports block-based iSCSI protocol so GRN's already implemented backup system can be directly managed at ease. On the other hand, the backup feature of the DSM is available using NFS protocol so schedule backup can be carried out at night time.
With the deployment of RS3412xs, the ESX environment of GRN is easily accessible with NFS connections and CIFS protocol for Windows clients. The NAS server also supports block-based iSCSI protocol so GRN's already implemented backup system can be directly managed at ease. On the other hand, the backup feature of the DSM is available using NFS protocol so schedule backup can be carried out at night time.
The Benefits
As RS3412xs features an easy and well-developed storage structure of the DSM, our requirements for building the rock solid IT infrastructure are effortlessly fulfilled. With the extensive feature set packed into the NAS servers, the ITuK has implemented more functionalities as they expected. The Synology NAS systems have quickly become integral parts of daily operations. Much to the ITuK's satisfaction, the NAS servers have been running stably and smoothly at full strength 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.
Recommended Models
- RS3412xs
Recommended Features
- Simple and easy system configuration
- Versatile protocol support for iSCSI, NFS, CIFS, SMB
- Hassle-free CIFS and NFS connection