Michel Perret Hospital Center
"We wanted to deploy a solution that would simplify administration and improve the performance of our IT. Configuring two Synology all-flash arrays in a high-availability cluster has helped us achieve performance that was unthinkable with our previous storage infrastructure, while also reducing our purchasing and operating costs."
Cédric Savona, IT Technician, Michel Perret Hospital Center, Tullins, France
The Company
The Michel Perret Hospital Center is an autonomous public health establishment located in the small municipality of Tullins, in the Isère department of France's mountainous southeast.
The medical center offers a diversified range of care, including more than 200 hospital beds, a day clinic, and 60 slots dedicated to home care by a mobile team.
The hospital employs almost 300 medical professionals who provide medical treatment, rehabilitation, and elderly care.
The Challenge
The Michel Perret Hospital Center depends on an IT infrastructure that includes 70 virtual machines running mission-critical databases, business applications, web servers, and security solutions, and storing administrative data.
The infrastructure serves more than 250 users accessing sensitive and crucial patient files.
Faced with an aging VM solution, the hospital decided they needed to offload their existing VMware ESXi servers to a separate VM storage solution. The solution had to offer both high performance and redundancy to ensure data availability.
The hospital's IT admins looked for a highly available storage solution that would work with VMware vMotion to enable live migration without service disruption between the ESXi servers.
As an additional risk mitigation strategy, the hospital required the solution to be deployed across two server rooms in two different buildings, as it had done with its VMware vSphere High Availability cluster.
To improve its data loss protection, the hospital wanted a backup solution for its VMs and a separate server to store redundant copies of all backup data offline.
The Solution
Based on positive experiences with Synology solutions, the hospital IT admins invited the company to propose a suitable storage solution.
All-flash Synology FS6400 units were recommended for their superior performance and compatibility with the medical center's existing infrastructure.
The hospital deployed one FlashStation unit in each of the two computer rooms. Synology High Availability (SHA) was leveraged to join the two all-flash units in a high-availability cluster.
The SHA cluster consists of an active server storing and managing VM data, and a passive server continuously synchronizing with the active device and ready at all times to take over in the event of irregularities on the main server.
The all-flash Synology units were connected internally and to the hospital's existing VMware vSphere High Availability cluster of three ESXi hypervisors using the FS6400's two built-in 10GbE ports and additional dual-port 10GbE network cards to enable load balancing and achieve network redundancy.
For its new backup configuration, the medical center deployed two large-capacity Synology RS3617RPxs units with a combination of Synology and third-party VM protection software.
One of the servers was configured to host VM backup copies made with a third-party backup solution, while the other unit was set up to create independent backups of each VM using Synology's Active Backup for Business (ABB) package for Windows, Linux, and Hyper-V and VMware protection.
The Benefits
The implementation was a huge success, lifting IOPS measured in the hospital's configuration from 822 to 71,000. The medical center now has an extremely responsive and efficient architecture that has improved the productivity of their staff.
Their new storage solution is fully redundant with the help of SHA and securely backed up with ABB, ensuring minimal service disruptions, and providing admins and users with reliable and fast data recovery options in the event of a disaster.
Best of all, Synology High Availability and Active Backup for Business are both entirely license-free solutions available on all compatible Synology hardware, making total cost of ownership highly transparent.
Synology's DiskStation Manager (DSM) operating system and software helped smooth the transition to a new storage configuration with their simplicity of operation, allowing the IT team to focus on other important tasks.
The Michel Perret Hospital Center now benefits from significantly improved IT and can rest assured knowing that its most critical data and applications are protected by a high degree of redundancy.
Thanks to Synology's Test & Buy Program, the hospital was able to try the FS6400 devices before deciding on a purchase. At every step of the process, Synology provided commercial and technical support, giving the IT team peace of mind.
Recommended Models
- FS6400 × 2
- RS3617RPxs × 2
Recommended Features
- High-performance VM storage on all-flash units
- Synology High Availability for business continuity
- Reliable storage for third-party backups
- VM protection with Active Backup for Business