GPTQ Transforms Medical Training with Huawei's Full-Stack Data Center Solution

About GPTQ

Founded in 2002, General Practice Training Queensland (GPTQ) is one of the largest general practice training organizations in Australia. As a not-for-profit, limited-by-guarantee public company that administers the Australian General Practice Training (AGPT) program, its vocational training program enables doctors to achieve accreditation as general practitioners. It also offers hospital doctors work experience opportunities in the medical specialty of general practice.

Headquartered in Brisbane, GPTQ employs 130 staff across its business-centered service offices in Stafford and Springwood in Brisbane, and in Toowoomba. It has more than 150 accredited medical centers in its partner ecosystem, delivering general practice training to address the primary healthcare needs of the communities within its geographical region.

As healthcare training directly impacts patient experience, GPTQ wanted to sharpen its training program by transforming from a traditional, decentralized, multi-vendor ICT solution to an ICT infrastructure that offers more flexibility, scalability, and manageability.

ICT Transformation for Better Healthcare

With a lean IT team based at its headquarters, management and troubleshooting of GPTQ’s varied networking, computing, and storage devices across its head office and branch sites was complex and tedious. There was also a lack of unified management of its storage devices, with varying performance levels across its primary and branch sites. What’s more, the decentralized procurement and maintenance processes made desktop standardization difficult.

With a constant stream of guests and doctors visiting its training centers, cyber security was important to ensure the safe handling, storage, and management of mission-critical data. GPTQ also wanted a more scalable and flexible network infrastructure to enhance IT responsiveness, in order to keep up with frequent changes in IT requirements, device upgrades, and other future service requirements.

GPTQ asked Huawei to propose a solution to standardize its desktop environment, as well as address its ever-escalating volume of service data. After a comprehensive Proof of Concept (PoC) exercise, GPTQ accepted Huawei Cloud Stack Desktop solution, which involved designing and implementing an end-to-end data center solution including servers, storage, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), switching, and security across all its offices.

Why Huawei

With a lean IT department, GPTQ wanted to work with a service provider with extensive ICT expertise. Seeing that Huawei’s FusionAccess VDI currently serves over 3000 enterprises and over 1.3 million users worldwide, GPTQ recognized Huawei’s commitment to R&D investment and its proven ICT expertise. Investing time in understanding GPTQ’s business via repeated PoCs, Huawei earned GPTQ’s trust as a valued technology partner.

Huawei's Solution for GPTQ

To power GPTQ’s virtualization infrastructure and applications, Huawei implemented its RH1288 rack servers, which find an ideal balance between performance and density. With FusionAccess VDI installed at its headquarters, GPTQ successfully standardized desktops across its head office, branches, training classrooms, and meeting rooms. Supporting industry-leading peripheral compatibility and adaptation capabilities, FusionAccess makes it fuss-free for GPTQ to deploy new desktops for new users, or configure access for guests visiting the office for meetings or training in minutes.

Providing GPTQ’s IT with end-to-end visibility and manageability, Huawei Cloud Stack Desktop also helps to streamline IT deployment, delivering agile and efficient Operations and Maintenance (O&M) to better support dynamic business requirements. Huawei CloudEngine data center switches also create a non-blocking stack that reaches all data centers in the region. Deployment is further simplified with Huawei S5700 switches that support the Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP), which assigns a unique IP address to each device.

GPTQ now enjoys enhanced data protection in its network with 99.999% reliability, backed by the Huawei Cloud Stack device-pipe-cloud control security protection system. By centralizing the storage of business and customer data at its data center — implementing strict role-based access control and encrypting data transfer — GPTQ further safeguards its mission-critical data, including those of its medical center partners, and the personal information of doctors attending its training. Additional security assurance comes from Huawei Secospace firewall, which enables access control and service acceleration through context awareness.

To help GPTQ meet its escalating data needs over the next five years, Huawei deployed a multi-tiered OceanStor storage solution, which provides up to eight controllers delivering 7 PB of capacity. Huawei’s OceanStor 18500 high-end storage system provides storage at GPTQ’s primary site, while OceanStor mid-range storage arrays serve its head office, as well as its three branch offices. A virtual tape library acts as the central backup platform. GPTQ’s IT can now centrally manage the storage devices via Huawei eSight, an integrated enterprise network management system.

With a disaster recovery network scheme implemented across all levels, GPTQ’s Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) was reduced, with further assurances on business continuity and service availability. Its staff now enjoy vast improvement in network performance and resilience, with seamless access to cross-platform applications and desktops via Huawei’s Thin Clients (TC) and other connected devices.

Ready for a New Dawn in Healthcare

Delighted with Huawei’s solution — achieving desktop standardization, better management of escalating data volume, and setting up a more flexible, scalable, and manageable network — GPTQ now has an end-to-end solution that addresses current challenges as well as readying the organization for the future requirements of the fast-growing healthcare industry.