The Sint Maartens Clinic, situated on the Nijmegen enbankment, is a leading hospital in the Netherlands and Europe specialised in the treatment of diseases affecting posture and mobility. To manage growing demand, the hospital has offered orthopaedic and rheumatic care in Woerden since 2006.
Every year, 50,000 people are treated at the Sint Maartens Clinic for complex diseases and common complaints and injuries.The hospital employs about 1500 people, including 80 specialists and assistant doctors in training. The hospital has its own scientific research department.
In the Sint Maartens orthopaedics centre, hundreds of operations are performed each year including 700 hip, 600 spinal column, 500 knee, etc. Acute injury cases can get emergency orthopaedic care 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In addition, the rheumatism department in the hospital treats 7,000 patients per year and the rehabilitation department in the convalescence centre in Nijmegen treats 500 adults and 300 children.
Taking care of patients 24x7 makes it critical that equipment and medical data is continuously available. This is an increasing challenge for the twelve-man strong automatization department, tells the Head of Automatization, Rob Kobes: “We were no longer able to guarantee the continuous availability of our existing storage environment. It was not a redundant environment, so we were not able to fall back to a back-up environment when there was a breakdown. It was also not possible to complete our back ups in the time available because the amount of our data had grown so fast.”
To improve data availability and to reduce costs and the administrative burden, Sint Maartens Clinic decided to look at solutions offered by server virtualization combined with a redundant storage environment. “We carried out an extensive tender procedure before we chose storage specialist, PROACT. They not only presented us with the best storage solution, but we also felt that they provided the best migration path. We never lost our trust in them. Actually, it was quite the opposite. Proact gave us great advice at both the organisational and technical level.”
PROACT proposed the implementation of a NetApp FAS3140 Metrocluster to provide optimal data availability and reduce the administration burden. “If there is a failure then there is
no fail-over time with the active-active cluster. Another huge advantage is that the NetApp tools are a very powerful combination with the vistualization of VMWare”, said Ron Kobes, who has a lot to say about PROACT’s role in the implementation and migration path.
“PROACT really is partner who thinks along with you. I would even call it “concerned”. PROACT has a lot of experience in the healthcare sector and you can see that in everything they do. PROACT really understands how important information is within healthcare and is very meticulous about what happens with it. The people from PROACT had a lot of technical expertise and knew exactly how to support us both practically and at an infrastructural level. For example, PROACT really helped us a great deal in migrating all the data from the old to the new environment.”
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