Hyperconvergence for critical medical systems

Kitasaito Hospital has provided local medical services in Asahikawa, Hokkaido, Japan, for more than 50 years. The hospital focuses on everything from acute and chronic care to nursing and home care.
In addition to operating the largest dialysis center in Hokkaido, Kitasaito Hospital maintains specialized departments for urology and nephrology, along with 10 other medical and nursing facilities.

To support its operations, Kitasaito Hospital had long relied on an IT infrastructure comprising around 70 servers and 450 client terminals. They supported a range of healthcare and administrative systems, including an electronic medical record (EMR) system used by all departments and various applications used by individual departments. 

Most of these servers operated in a virtualized environment, built using Microsoft Hyper-V server virtualization technology. In the past, Kitasaito Hospital ran approximately 60 virtual servers on six physical servers. It also relied on a dedicated physical server, configured in a high-availability cluster, as the database server for its EMR system. Alongside this, the hospital used local disks built into the physical servers to secure storage space for its virtual infrastructure.