In a hospital, ICT uptime can be a matter of life and death. To make sure its SQL and Oracle database environments are always available, az Glorieux relies on the expert services of Monin, an Uptime Company.

az Glorieux (General Hospital Glorieux) is part of Werken Glorieux, a Belgian not for profit organization that is active in health care, children’s care and elderly care. Werken Glorieux’s health care activities include the general hospital in Ronse, 3 outpatient clinics and several centres for haemodialysis.

The organization also runs a number of children’s care centres and residential care centres for the elderly. The centralized ICT team of 12 employees supports the entire group: 12 facilities, 100 doctors and 1.200 employees. az Glorieux is one of the 7 hospitals in the E17 Hospital Network.

Preventive maintenance

“We run ICT with a small team”, says Siemen Vanneste, ICT Project Manager Infrastructure at Werken Glorieux. “Over the years, we have developed a broad view on our ICT environment. When we need specialized expertise, we rely on trusted partners.” Uptime Group is one of the hospital’s partners for ICT infrastructure. “We call on Monin’s expertise to streamline our operations, among other things.” As the infrastructure team wanted to implement a standard procedure for database deployment, for example, it turned to Monin, an Uptime Group company. “Monin has a lot of experience in the hospital market”, Vanneste continued. “They know the best practices for that kind of requests.”

Every four months, Monin performs preventive maintenance on the hospital’s SQL and Oracle databases. Monin verifies all configurations, lists all necessary future actions regarding patches and upgrades, and checks if all procedures follow the best practices that were defined for the environment. “The main goal of the exercise is to make sure that the right people know what needs to be done, be it our own ICT team or the application vendors. The principal objective is, of course, to keep a strict eye on the performance, availability and security of the database environment. Because in a hospital, obviously, ICT uptime is of utmost importance.”

Overnight migration

When specific database projects are scheduled, az Glorieux calls on Monin’s expertise as well. For the implementation of RIS on WEB (software for radiology), for example, Monin performed the installation of Microsoft SQL 2017 on a new server. Monin was also part of the team that migrated OAZIS, the hospital’s patient administration software. “The OS reached the end of its life cycle”, Vanneste explained. “We needed to migrate the entire configuration, consisting of 4 production servers and 2 test servers.” In close collaboration with Monin, the team succesfully migrated the environment overnight.

“That was a very business-critical exercise”, Vanneste continued. “The OAZIS software acts as the data source for all further communication about patient information. The data from OAZIS is fed into the electronic medical record, the applications for tarification, invoicing, and more.” Without OAZIS, the hospital would come to a standstill. “So, once again, availability is very, very important.” Last but not least, Monin was also part of the project team that upgraded the hospital’s FORCEA data warehouse to a new SQL version.

Peace of mind

“The tricky part is that we need to perform this type of migration while the hospital keeps running. You can’t just shut the hospital down for a day, because of some database migration.” To reduce the application downtime to the absolute minimum during the migration, Monin and az Glorieux planned the interventions in the middle of the night. “For every project, we did some extensive testing during the day, followed by the migration of the production servers during the night.” And of course, on those special days and nights, Monin always had some extra experts on standby, just in case.

“Thanks to Monin, we have access to a broad range of expertise and services”, Vanneste concluded. “We also count on Monin for the maintenance of our Oracle databases, among other things, or for running Veeam on SQL for backup. Sure, we know how to keep the light on over here, but whenever we need some extra assistance, Monin is just a phone call away. Knowing we have all that expertise within reach, offers us the peace of mind any ICT team needs.”

“Over the years, we have developed a broad view on our ICT environment. But when we need specialized expertise, we rely on trusted partners, such as Monin.” – Siemen Vanneste, ICT Project Manager Infrastructure at az Glorieux