Faster results for better healthcare

Located in Bonheiden, Belgium, Imelda Hospital has 1,700 employees, 160 doctors, and more than 100 volunteers taking care of patients. It has 502 beds for traditional
hospitalization and a day hospital with 94 beds. On an annual basis, the hospital has more than 180,000 consultations. Providing the most innovative techniques and continuous training of employees makes it a modern and dynamic hospital.

Imelda Hospital prides itself on its quality of care and its innovative approach to
health. Technology plays a key role in ensuring patients get the best treatment, such as modern medical scanning and imaging technology. However, creating
CT scans, MRIs, and X-rays generates a huge volume of data – up to 50TB per year.
The existing three-tier storage solution was reaching its limit and to extend it would
be costly. Imelda Hospital also needed to enable back up and disaster recovery.

“We have 1,400 PCs and 300 servers running so there’s plenty of work to be done,”
explains Kim Buts, IT Systems Team Lead at Imelda Hospital. “We noticed that the
current system was reaching its limit, and doctors had occasional problems with the speed of getting their images on the picture archiving and communication system (PACS). They are used to speed, that when the images come in and they scroll through them, they will all be there in sequence. Every now and then they would start to get glitches. It was purely because we were getting close to our storage limit, and that’s why we looked at the marketplace.”

Following a deep dive with Fujitsu into the technical specifications and a comprehensive evaluation of the market, including conducting proof of concepts, Imelda Hospital chose to deploy Qumulo software-defined file storage. Qumulo is the breakthrough leader in simplifying unstructured file data management for high-performance workloads at exabyte scale. For four years it has been one of the leading analyst houses and is a consistently high-scoring Net Promoter participant.

The Qumulo file data platform is a high performing nearline file storage system, which is designed for massive scalability in terms of performance, capacity, and the number of files it can manage. It was integrated with the existing Agfa Enterprise Imaging file data, while two sites were synchronized and replicated to enable disaster recovery.

“Two requirements that were essential were that our production had to remain 100% operational,” adds Buts. “There could be no impact on performance. There should be no downtime. We also needed to complete the transition in as short a time as possible.”

Now, Imelda Hospital enjoys a much faster and more reliable storage platform that can scale as the image data continues to grow exponentially. It was set up in just 30 minutes, enabling a seamless migration with minimal onsite disruption, and allows applications to be installed in the cloud without having to rewrite them.

This paves the way for Imelda Hospital to embark on a cloud-first strategy, moving
more workloads to the cloud for lower costs and improved performance. Images are now available for doctors and healthcare professionals instantly, rather than having to wait to download. Ultimately, this enhances the patient experience and helps ensure the best treatment.

“We made a huge gain in the speed and have been able to fine tune our system to
really improve it,” concludes Buts. “The doctors are happy too. Usually, you won’t
hear a word from a doctor who is satisfied. Since the migration we have received
nothing but positive feedback for the gain in speed. Everyone is happy.”