customer
Hessing Kliniken

industry
Healthcare

Number of employees
1,400 employees

task
Data center modernization

Project

• Consulting and planning
• Project management and manufacturer selection
• Mentoring and supervision of the installation

To the Hessing Clinics website

Imaging techniques for diagnostics in orthopedics require a lot of storage space. Healthcare centers such as the Hessing Clinics in Augsburg therefore need to keep their IT infrastructure up to date. At the Hessing Clinics, the existing data storage solution was increasingly reaching its capacity limits. Microstaxx was commissioned to adapt the existing storage solution to the requirements of the coming years and thus make data storage future-proof.

The Hessing Clinics are one of Europe’s leading centers of excellence in orthopedics, providing the highest level of medical and nursing care to more than 13,000 inpatients annually. With over 1,400 employees, the Hessing Clinics are also a significant medium-sized company.

Initial situation

High-resolution images must be stored securely and reliably and be quickly accessible at all times. This places high demands on the IT infrastructure, especially on the storage systems.

To make the new system future-proof and flexible, the IT department at Hessing Clinics decided to look for a scalable system. Growth with continuously increasing data volumes should be easy to manage. The previous storage solution had to be replaced in the near future due to expiring software licenses. “This resulted in a tight time frame in which the new system had to be implemented,” says Thomas Mayerhofer, Strategic Enterprise Architect at Microstaxx, describing the start. “In IT, we have been dealing with long and sometimes uncertain delivery times for several years. Tight deadlines are therefore a very special challenge in such a project.”

The IT team at the Hessing Foundation, led by division manager Markus Großmann and administrator Bernhard Wächter, relied on the many years of expertise of their IT partner Microstaxx, their proven collaboration, and a relationship built on trust.
Microstaxx planned and installed the clinics’ network ten years ago and has been maintaining it ever since. “Our network has been running absolutely reliably since the beginning of our partnership with Microstaxx. We are also extremely satisfied with the rare maintenance work that is required. That’s why choosing an IT partner for the new storage project was not difficult for us,” sums up Bernhard Wächter, IT administrator at Hessing Clinics.

Solution

The inventory of the existing data center and planning for a new data center project began in 2023. “We liked that the project planning was efficient and goal-oriented. Microstaxx listened to us and understood what solutions we needed and where our specific challenges lay,” summarizes Wächter.

Thomas Mayerhofer, Strategic Enterprise Architect at Microstaxx “Our goal was to implement a flexibly scalable system not only for now, but also for the coming years, in order to avoid cost traps later on.” The new storage solution should have the longest possible operating time and be adaptable in order to save resources in the long term. The decision was made in favor of a state-of-the-art all-flash system that offers optimal efficiency and security across two locations and combines all the desired advantages.

The all-flash system is a dual-controller active-active storage system that is easier to manage than complex storage solutions that require additional software. The solution does not require an additional software layer or management node. This simplifies commissioning and makes it more cost-effective. Security, performance, and user-friendliness are maintained. This means that the system is easier to manage, offers large capacity, and provides high-speed data access.

Bernhard Wächter is also satisfied: “Compared to our previous storage system, we now have significantly less maintenance work in our day-to-day business. And by switching to all-flash, we no longer have any performance bottlenecks. These are enormous advantages for us.”

From Microstaxx’s point of view, it was a challenging project because the installation had to be carried out with minimal downtime and there was also time pressure due to expiring software licenses. Microstaxx therefore negotiated with the manufacturer at an early stage of the project planning process to guarantee timely delivery.

The manufacturer delivered on time, and the installation of the new system and data transfer went smoothly. The hospital’s IT department carried out the final installation independently. “Thanks to the precisely coordinated approach with Microstaxx, we were cost-efficient and were able to build up additional knowledge. It was almost like a workshop for us,” says IT administrator Wächter happily.

Conclusion

The new storage system provides the hospital with secure data storage and the hospital’s IT staff with an easy-to-use, fast, secure, and scalable storage solution without performance bottlenecks.