Centre Hospitalier de Douai
Located in the commune of Douai in northern France, the Centre Hospitalier de Douai employs about 1,800 people, including 300 doctors. In addition to general patient admissions, this 800-bed hospital also has a pharmacy and an urgent care center distributed across two primary sites and 17 remote sites. This is a busy healthcare center: in 2008, the Centre Hospitalier took care of 37,200 hospitalized patients, the staff doctors saw 71,000 patients, and there were 1,400 births in the maternity ward. All of this is taken care of by an IT staff of 13 people who maintain the IT infrastructure to keep operations in good health.
The Challenge
When Philippe Huddlestone joined the company last year, he brought with him a wealth of knowledge from more than 20 years experience in hospital IT. Winner of the 2008 CIO award in France, Huddlestone stepped in as CTO of Centre Hospitalier De Douai last year. He quickly established two main goals for the IT infrastructure: to deliver continuous availability of 99.999% (fivenines uptime), and to support the hospital as it streamlined its processes and took on new projects.
“Technology is an important weapon to optimize profitability and improve service to patients,” said Huddlestone. “The management team is focused on moving the hospital in the right direction.”
Huddlestone and his team looked at the systems in place to manage and run business applications, register patients, provide secure access to medical records and other patient information, serve medical products, and manage the telephone system – each with different criteria.
As a result of this analysis, they determined that they needed to improve the security of critical data and to improve response times – especially for critical applications, i.e. those applications directly involved in the care of patients. In short, they needed to improve storage performance.
The Solution
The Centre Hospitalier de Douai IT department purchased two Pillar Axiom 600 SAN storage solutions, each with 18TB of capacity. These systems form the backbone of the company’s business continuance solution, with one high-available platform replicated to a second, identical platform.
With this system in place in their virtualized data center, Huddlestone and his team achieved the five-nines availability that was one of their key goals. The Pillar Axiom’s non-disruptive upgrade feature contributes to its ability to remain online continuously, allowing administrators to add more capacity easily – without taking the system down.
In the 24/7 hospital environment, issues must be handled by the IT staff on hand. The Axiom’s easy management interface makes it possible for the staff to handle all the administration of the system without having to bring in specialists or other consultants. With the Pillar Axiom, they can deal with the system rapidly and easily.
A key benefit of the Pillar Axiom is the high utilization rate. While Pillar Data Systems guarantees a utilization rate of 80 percent or more, Huddlestone and his IT team have achieved rates of around 92 percent without any performance impact. This is partly accomplished by Pillar’s Quality of Service (QoS) which places all the data within a single system, yet allocates resources to tiers of data much as you might provision virtual servers.
“Our Pillar solution provides the availability we need and has a very good price for the expectations that we have for it,” said Huddlestone. “Other solutions we looked at are up to three times the price of the Pillar, but didn’t deliver nearly as much benefit.” | 
United Kingdom
