RHEIS virtualises a safer hospital sleep for SaferSleep
Background and Customer Issues:
SaferSleep provides an anesthesia safety and record automation solution for hospitals and ambulatory surgical facilities. The SAFERsleep System was founded on safety principles derived from wide-ranging research examining anesthesia error and its cause. The system is designed to increase safety in anesthesia by intercepting known error precursors before human error occurs.
Our customer was initiating the planning stages of the application and infrastructure architecture for its next SAFERsleep release. RHEIS was involved to provide expert strategic infrastructure advice and to design and implement a fit for purpose environment.
The key customer's issues were as follows:
- Each client environment required its own isolated environment, which meant an additional physical server per client installation, increasing the cost of each deployment.
- Growth estimates for the SAFERsleep system predicted a significant number of new sites, and they needed to know that their architecture would scale and grow to meet demands for their service.
- As a hospital system providing patient health outcomes, the availability and resiliency of the architecture was paramount.
- There was to be no single points of failure.
- The management of the existing environments was complex and required specialist infrastructure competencies.
- Building additional test and integration environments was slow and time consuming.
The Approach & Solution:
RHEIS proposed that SaferSleep move to a virtualised infrastructure using VMware virtualisation technologies. The solution design was based around having a primary virtualized server running each of the client environments as well as the database server. A secondary hot standby server, with identically configured client environments and a replicated database, would be available should the primary system fail.
Resiliency was built into each physical server through having dual network connections, dual power supplies and mirrored hard drives. On the network a dual switch - dual firewall configuration was implemented to remove single points of failure.
The individual virtual machines (each one containing either a client application environment or the database server or the integration server) run within a VMware virtual server environment, which manages access to the physical resources (CPU, RAM, Disk, Network) on the server. Traffic to each primary virtual machine can be quickly redirected to the secondary server holding the hot standby virtual machines, should an issue arise on the primary server. In addition the hot standby server was used to run the monitoring application for the environment.
Development, test, integration and preproduction environments were built using the same architecture to ensure consistency.
Benefits to our Customer:
- A production environment with resiliency built into the hardware and network to reduce the single points of failure that may create an outage.
- The availability and recovery requirements are met by the provision of a hot standby that can be failed over to in the event of an issue on the primary server.
- A scalable and flexible environment - additional client environments (virtual machines) can be quickly deployed onto the existing infrastructure as new clients join SaferSleep.
- Should growth exceed the capacity of the primary physical server, another physical virtualised server can be added to the pool to run the client environments.
- The management of the environment is provided through a VMware administrative console which allows the addition of new environments, the management of existing virtual machines and their resources, capacity and utilisation monitoring.
