Malaysian hospital revamps data centre architecture

Sunway Medical Centre (SunMed), located in Petaling Jaya, not far from the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur, is one of the foremost private medical facilities in Malaysia. Not only has it been ISO 9001:2000, MS ISO 15189 and Malaysian Society for Quality in Health (MSQH) accredited, it also runs its own Facebook fan page with frequent discussions with the public.

SunMed’s ICT implementation began in 1999, where the first basic Hospital Information System as well as Payroll and Accounting were implemented. The whole hospital had 25 PCs at that time.

Today that number has grown by about 20 times to more than 1000 PCs and printer. Applications have also extended into clinical areas, including Medication and Supplies Dispensing System, Cardiovascular Image Management System and Critical Care Management System, all of which are mission critical.

A new building expanded which completed recently has more than doubled the number of network points.

“Like most companies, we faced insufficient space, UPS power and cooling coupled with legacy tower servers that had single power supply and network port,” says Rachel Lim, SunMed’s IT manager.

As the data centre was not automatically managed, it was difficult for IT staff to be aware of a power trip or air-conditioning power problem. “Downtime was frequent and we at the IT department were only notified when the users complained about not able to access the services,” Lim tells FutureGov.

The legacy standalone UPS units were also problematic when new servers needed to be installed.

“Which UPS should the new server be connected to? Whether we should install new air-conditioners?” Lim says, explaining that without situational awareness, it was difficult for them to optimise the data centre power efficiency.

An upgrade in December 2008 not only expanded the data centre physically, but also revamped the whole power and cooling infrastructure.

“In 1999 our data centre occupied only 200 square feet of space,” reveals Lim to FutureGov. “Now it is more than 800 square feet.”

In addition to a redesign of the power supply system to make it more scalable according to needs, An on-demand architecture called InfraStruXureR was deployed to ensure in-row cooling – cooling the servers without wasting energy to cool the surrounding environment.

New cooling units are only added when new servers are installed.

Revealing that currently there is no plan to move data and applications to the cloud, Lim nevertheless points out the option is well worth considering when cloud computing becomes ‘better defined and controlled’.