Huawei All-Flash Storage Supports Essen University Hospital to Accelerate Its Digital Healthcare Systems

Essen University Hospital celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2019. As early as 1909, before the hospital as we know it was established, it actually started operating as a practice called "Städtische Krankenanstalt" with only four clinics. It became a teaching hospital in 1963. It has since become the largest nursing hospital in North Rhine-Westphalia, where it is known colloquially as the "Ruhr Metropolitan Hospital".

The Hospital ranks 6th among all 35 university-affiliated hospitals in Germany, the highest ranking in NRW. It focuses on three main areas of research and treatment, namely cardiovascular disease, cancer and transplantation. Its annual turnover exceeds 800 million Euros.

The Essen University Hospital covers an enormous 54 acres and provides 1,770 beds for inpatients. It employs 8,500 people, and treats approximately 50,000 inpatients and 195,000 outpatients each year. Its clinics are top of the range.

Due to ever-increasing user data coming from Radiological Information Systems (RIS), Hospital Information Systems (HIS), Electronic Medical Records (EMR), as well as Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS), the Essen University Hospital is facing huge demands on their storage performance. Virtual machines and the physical database servers run on separated storage systems, adding new layers of complexity to management and networking. As the hospital is under such tremendous pressure, the customer is looking to innovate and modernize its IT system infrastructure to cope with the sheer amount of traffic. To realize this goal, a partner with an end-to-end datacenter portfolio is needed.

Huawei's Dorado NVMe All-Flash Storage systems consolidate storage resources for both the virtualized and physical hosts, with ease of management on a single plane. Powered by advanced technologies including NVMe over Fabric, active-active mirroring, the solution delivers an IOPS of over 300,000 IOPS at a mere 0.3 ms latency. It is able to virtualize and take over legacy storage systems, making the migration of critical workloads from low-performing infrastructure to the lighting-fast Huawei Dorado All-Flash Storage close to effortless. The solution can therefore improve storage performance while simultaneously reducing costs.

In addition to outstanding performance, the customer has saved at least 30% CAPEX with the 100% self-developed Huawei solution. With 36 NVMe SSD slots in a single 2U chassis, the rack space and datacenter footprint have been reduced by 50%. As a leading ICT solutions provider, the end-to-end datacenter portfolio of Huawei makes it an ideal partner to empower innovation of the customer.