INTRODUCTION

Jessa Ziekenhuis is one of the largest general hospitals in Belgium and is located at three sites: two in Hasselt and one in Herk-de-Stad. Each site used to be an independent hospital, until the three organizations merged their operations. The hospital has around 3.500 employees and its IT team consists of 30 employees.

To make data systems highly available, they asked Monin to migrated the hospital’s Oracle environment into new hardware, to implement Oracle Virtual Machine and to upgrade both the OS and Oracle Database.

CHALLENGE

The hospital’s IT team dedicates most of its time to operational support. In-house, they develop and maintain the knowledge they need to keep the lights on at all times. To have access to specialized expertise for its Oracle environment, the hospital established a long-term partnership with Monin. 

At Jessa Ziekenhuis, Oracle is the most commonly used platform, hosting 18 Oracle databases. Although the hospital also uses MS SQL, most core applications run on Oracle Database: patient records, patient administration, radiology, laboratory, and more. Monin offers implementation, configuration and support services for the complete Oracle stack – servers and databases. 

“Over the years, we have redefined and refined our relationship with Monin several times. It is safe to say that the partnership with Monin has brought stability and maturity to our Oracle environment.” – Nordine Vandezande, IT Manager at Jessa Ziekenhuis

SOLUTION

Monin upgraded the OS and Oracle Database, and implemented Oracle Virtual Machine on new hardware. We installed three new hosts, each running Oracle VM, at the three data center locations. On the Oracle VM platform, the hospital runs four production database servers and two test database servers.

The procedure for the NetApp storage solution (MetroClusters) – linked to the servers – has remained the same. In the past, moving servers from one data center to the other always implied downtime. During the migration to the new virtual servers, the data weren’t accessible for limited time only, thanks to the use of restore/recovery procedures. Instead of removing the data from the old environment and uploading it to the new servers, Monin performed a restore of the data backups. 

TECHNOLOGY

Backups are performed by SnapManager for Oracle. Every hour, a snapshot is taken from the entire databases storage environment. In turn, every backup is replicated on a second storage location.

Thanks to Monin’s Service Level Manager, Jessa Ziekenhuis has easy access to the wide range of technology expertise that is offered by the Uptime Group.

“IT is strongly integrated with all of our core care processes and it’s absolutely essential that our IT environment is available at all times. Monin helps us to meet that business need, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.” – Nordine Vandezande