Champlain Valley Physicians Hospital Creates New Data Center for Scalability and High-Density, High-Efficiency Computing

CHALLENGE

‍The hospital, built in 1910, did not have a modern space for a data center. The space allocated for a ‘data center’ continued to cause issues as the hospital moved forward with their information technology (IT) master plan and implemented projects like virtualization and health information technologies. The existing data center had an aging UPS, cooling, and telecommunications infrastructure, was poorly arranged and left no room for rack growth, and it could not support the required density needed for their strategic plans.

CVPH needed a long-term solution and hired Leading Edge Design Group (LEDG) to perform an assessment of the existing space and present solutions to support the long-term stability of their information technology (IT) environment.

ASSESSMENT

‍During the assessment phase of the project, LEDG found several risk factors that impacted the data center’s ability to support the hospital’s growing needs. Most notably, the aging power and cooling infrastructure le the data center vulnerable and at risk of downtime.

LEDG proposed two options for CVPH, one that would allow them to renovate their current space and a second that created a new data center adjacent to their existing one. It was evident to CVPH that a new data center not only enabled them to leverage best practices for redundancy and energy efficiency in their design, it also minimized the impact on current data center IT systems. LEDG detailed a construction plan outlining how the new data center could be built without impacting uptime to their current facility and a migration plan indicating how systems could be cut over to the new data center when it was live and commissioned.

SOLUTION

After CVPH’s review of the assessment and organizational approval, the team moved forward to create a new data center using the space immediately adjacent to the current data center. What originally didn’t look like enough space and occupied by the IT staff, LEDG was able to design and deliver a scalable, high-density data center design for CVPH. The design provided a seamless migration plan for relocating equipment from the existing data center to the newly built and commissioned center and was able to accommodate all legacy gear as well as the high-density deployment of their Cisco UCS environment. LEDG created a cooling design that was N+1 redundant, dramatically improving the reliability of the data center as compared to the current facility. New modular, scalable UPS technology was implemented to enable capacity additions without downtime as they grow.

The new data center is beneath an old mechanical room, and there were concerns about leaking. LEDG implemented a customized drip-pan design with leak detection monitoring to protect critical equipment from any mechanical room issues.

The new data center includes:

New scalable UPS architecture

N+1 cooling redundancy in high density, high-efficiency design|

10Gb copper and 40Gb ber optic connectivity to each rack

Clean agent fire protection

Physical security–card access

The new data center and improved technology infrastructure that can better support The University of Vermont Health Network – Champlain Valley Physicians Organization’s seamless, coordinated health care system that provides the right care, in the right place at the right time.‍‍