CHUV – A disruptive „Hyperconverged“ solution for the CHUV, which has now become Benchmark.

Challenge.

The IT of a university hospital must be robust, reliable, flexible and high-performance in order to provide clinical and non-clinical applications in complete security, while meeting current compliance standards. Security is a crucial issue, and systems must be responsive and powerful enough to manage, store and process the vast quantities of data generated by our activities. The CHUV‘s IT teams wanted to simplify their IT infrastructure and were keen to implement an HCI-type hyperconverged solution to introduce complian- ce across their entire stack and benefit from simplified lifecycle management with a single support point. A simpler, more scalable solution using automated technologies that will eventually enable them to migrate to the Cloud. Patrice Bonnet tells us: „This major project has a very specific timeframe. In mid-2019, just a few months before the health crisis and the lockdown, we drew up this project, then issued the public invitation to tender, and finally awarded the contract in September 2000 after answering more than 200 questions. „4 service providers were shortlisted, with Bechtle Switzerland being the final choice. The project comprised two components: the HCI infrastructure and a backup component entrusted directly to Dell Technologies.

The solution.

The solution had to meet the following constraints: storage and computing resources had to be integrated on the same hardware. In addition, 4 physical environments had to be deployed: a production environment, a DEV/VAL, a DMZ and a Management environment. This new infrastructure also needed to have the capacity to host around 1,800 VMs, taking into account the integration of backups, the resilience of production on two separate sites and the management of global updates.
In collaboration with our strategic partner Dell Techno- logies, we have built a „State of the Art“ hyperconverged infrastructure, offering centralised management from the vCenter, with unified support for the entire solution from a single point of contact. All the software and hardware is certified, a prerequisite for a world-renowned teaching hospital such as the CHUV. We have developed a resilient, scalable and high-performance solution, sized and built specifically for the CHUV, which is also Cloud ready, ready for the future with redundancy on a third site, compatible and integrated with VRA and VRO, vSAN, VMC, vSPhere and Tanzu Kubernetes. It‘s a highly innovative, disruptive solution that has now become a benchmark.„We had to bring the server and network teams closer together. Initially, we were faced with a few obstacles, but thanks to the in-house training we put in place to help everyone understand each other better, especially technically, we were all able to adopt the same language, thanks to the many discussions we had with the Bechtle and Dell Technologies experts, especially for the Network part, which was also very complex. We overcame this chal- lenge and we all came out of this major project stronger,“ says Patrice Bonnet. It took some time to get the system up and running, as we first had to be sure of the backup delivered by Dell Technologies, but the Bechtle teams supported us in particular by exchanging, passing on and sharing knowledge. Our VMs were moved between spring and summer 2022. So the timeline challenge was met. Everything now works and works well,“ explains Patrice Bonnet, adding:

Benefits.

One of the major advantages of the solution is its simplified management. The HCI system is extremely easy to deploy and manage. A hyper-converged infrastructure also improves efficiency by limiting hardware requirements for storage, computing and separate networking. It provides greater flexibility through easy scalability, and also offers much better performance and lower latency. These are all benefits that the CHUV is now enjoying. „Our new infrastructure is designed to support the future,“ says Patrice Bonnet. We have a large production cluster that is not at all saturated. The team that manages the VMs is much more autonomous than before, and works much more flexibly. We benefit from modern, fully automated VM backup management thanks to a tagging system. Lifecycle management is also much simpler, with releases arriving and being deployed automatically, which is very beneficial“, shares Patrice Bonnet. „Another advantage for us is that we save a considerable amount of space. Our old system consisted of 428 rack units. Now, with the takeover and extension, we have 84 racks, a ratio of more than 5. Our carbon footprint has also been drastically reduced, and HCI infrastructures are said to be 30% more economical“, concludes Patrice Bonnet.

Partners.