Comsys implements virtual infrastructure for UPMC Beacon Hospital

Trade

Technology consultancy Comsys has announced the successful implementation of a new IT solution for UPMC Beacon Hospital.

The new IT infrastructure was required to support the Hospital’s mission critical Meditech application which controls all the records of patient care and treatments. The solution Comsys implemented consisted of architecture design, technical implementation, training and long term support.

The project, valued at €150,000 but the cost savings in terms of upgrades and maintenance of older technology means the project will almost have paid for itself in year one alone.

The solution involved deploying six virtual machines running the production environment built on VMware vCentre. For storage a new EMC VNX 5300 SAN was installed with EMC FAST suite and two Brocade switches. To meet the demanding backup requirements, two EMC Data Domain DD160s were deployed – one in the primary hospital site, the other in the UPMC datacentre in the US, with replication to the secondary site four times a day.

David Mulqueen, IT Manager for UPMC Beacon Hospital, said: "Patient care is the top priority for everyone in the Hospital and using Meditech allows us to have a very efficient system of managing all records of patient care and treatments. Comsys were chosen to design and implement this system as it was essential to have a reliable supplier who could support us in the long run, but it was also critically important that we experienced no downtime on the Meditech application during this IT hardware transformation process."

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