Costaisa: Laying the Digital Foundations for a New Era in Healthcare

The Costaisa Group has specialized in the healthcare sector since 1968, offering clinical business con-sultancy, IT solutions and outsourcing services and is the main outsourcer for a national healthcare organization in Spain, with more than 4000 users and 200 facilities. The group recently sought to mod-ernize its DCN infrastructure, which led to a fruitful partnership with Huawei.

Costaisa Group building, Barcelona, Spain

Embracing digital

A common challenge for most modern healthcare providers striving to improve healthcare efficiency and performance is a lack of a robust digitized framework. In this regard, traditional infrastructure is increasingly ill-suited to the demands of healthcare organizations undergoing digitalization.

Costaisa recognized that a complete modernization of its IT infrastructure was required to secure its future success. Digital transformation was perceived as the key that would unlock new business oppor-tunities and a better overall customer experience. The mission-critical nature of this project made speed of delivery a vital success criterion.

Choosing the right network partner

Costaisa carefully assessed different vendor options when considering a new network partner, with the hope of finding a solution which could ensure seamless interaction between the private and public cloud and provide absolute transparency of the health of its data center networks.

Aside from the need for rapid rollout, the customer identified a need for automation flexibility, hence, a solution based on cutting-edge technology was required to support this. Providing this capability would free up human resources for more valuable activities, relieving employees of the burden of more labor-intensive tasks. Advanced operation and management of on-site and cloud data centers via a unified platform was a further requirement. The degree of technical support provided by both the partner and vendor during deployment and beyond was yet another factor that would influence Costaisa’s overall decision, while cost sensitivities also played a key role.

The perfect antidote

After consultations with Costaisa to understand its needs, Huawei presented a range of solutions that would satisfy the full requirements of the project from a technical, cost, and speed of deployment perspective. Among the solutions provided were the following:

The iMaster NCE-Fabric, an autonomous driving network that integrates management, control, analysis, and advanced functionality for data center network scenarios, providing compatibility with with private data centers, without adding components. The system provides cloud-based resources, full lifecycle network automation, and intelligent closed-loop capabilities driven by data analytics, along with 100% correct network configuration and service provisioning within minutes.

The iMaster NCE-Fabric Insight network analyzer, which detects network health status in real time and monitors networks from the perspective of applications, helping customers detect inconsistencies in a timely manner whilst ensuring that applications are robust and continue to run without interruption. This enables intelligent O&M via a user-friendly interface.

Automatic network E2E one-stop orchestration, which uses 21 different types of network intent as input to implement intent-centric E2E highly automated capabilities. In the planning phase, this enables intelligent data center network design based on user intentions, greatly reducing construction time and costs, whilst ensuring speedy upgrades, and capacity expansion of infrastructure. The provisioning efficiency is three times the industry average, facilitating service rollout in minutes.

Integral within the overall package was the CloudEngine 6881 and 8851 series of next generation switches, which provide high-performance, high-density ports with a flexible airflow design to build elastic, virtual, and high-quality 400GE/100GE full-mesh networks to support the full range of cloud data center requirements.

Digitization: the cornerstone of competitivity

Huawei’s package of digital network infrastructure solutions provided the perfect foundation for Costaisa’s data center hybrid cloud strategy, supporting integration with VMware and unified deployment and management with private data centers.

The overall solution was designed for fast service provisioning, and with Huawei’s support throughout the configuration process, the network was successfully deployed with 100% accuracy, with all services up and running within a matter of minutes.

The shift to intelligent O&M heralds a new era for Costaisa’s network infrastructure, providing absolute transparency of network health and where specific action is required to address faults, even before they have occurred. With substantial improvements in terms of O&M efficiency, Costaisa is well positioned for success on its digitalization journey, with the countless opportunities that this will bring. Efficiency gains are further amplified by the use of next-generation technologies, which frees up staff for more valuable tasks.

Customers benefit from zero waiting time for service deployment, established technical mechanisms to prevent accidents caused by operation errors and a proactive prediction of faults with no interruption to O&M, all of which position Costaisa to delight its customer base in a new digital era.