Excelleris Technologies Limited Partnership (Excelleris) delivers healthcare information distribution and access services in British Columbia, comprising distribution of laboratory, health records and medical imaging content to providers and patients via Web-based portals.
HIGHLIGHTS
Modernized hardware infrastructure includes increased server consolidation ratios
60 physical servers consolidated into a single UCS blade server chassis
Power consumption, cooling requirements & co-location fees reduced
“Compugen’s consulting service and support were crucial to helping us unlock the full capability of the new infrastructure.”- Jennifer Cudlipp, CEO, Excelleris Technologies Limited Partnership
Business growth, and the need to ensure service delivery to the community and public healthcare service providers in a manner that is highly available and highly secure, necessitated investment by Excelleris in leading-edge information technology infrastructure.
"Excelleris is a service provider to the healthcare sector, and events such as unplanned downtime or security breaches are simply unacceptable," stresses the CEO at Excelleris.
With existing IT equipment approaching the end of its useful life, some form of data centre transformation was also required that would offer the latest technology and the capacity to support significantly more data and transaction volumes and thus, more business.
Excelleris decided to undertake a data centre transformation and co-locate its new IT infrastructure in a secure third-party datacentre rather than building its own facility in-house. With Compugen's help, a new data centre solution was architected, designed and readied for implementation at Excelleris' co-location facility, including a new server infrastructure based on the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and several Internet and VPN private WAN network paths based on Cisco switching and routing technology.
Compugen's initial assessments of Excelleris' current infrastructure also determined that its legacy storage device needed to be replaced. A Hitachi Unified Storage SAN was chosen and attached to the UCS server infrastructure through Cisco MDS Fabric Interconnect switches.
The new UCS server platform enabled Excelleris to consolidate roughly 60 existing physical servers into a single UCS chassis with only four or five server blades. Such a big physical footprint reduction means substantially less electricity consumption and cooling requirements, so Excelleris will also be able to manage its 'green footprint' much more effectively.
The infrastructure modernization will also save Excelleris nearly 50% in co-location fees compared to the cost if they had simply moved their legacy footprint into the co-location facility. Excelleris will also realize additional savings in software licensing and operations.