The Connectivity and Reliability of Your Network's Central Nervous System

by Robert Leake on 9/23/20 1:49 PM

The second in a series of posts that explores the vital signs of a healthcare system’s digital and physical infrastructure, this blog takes a closer look at the connectivity and reliability of your network’s central nervous system—the digital infrastructure responsible for ensuring healthcare continuity.

The reliability of critical infrastructure is arguably the most important vital sign when it comes to ensuring continuity in healthcare. Functioning much like the human body’s central nervous system, your IT infrastructure must continuously communicate with, monitor, and protect power and thermal management systems in order to stop downtime before it happens, and ensure that patient data and medical equipment are always available when and where they are needed.

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As your healthcare system’s command and control center, your IT infrastructure is the link that connects medical staff with patient data. Its reliability is paramount as even a moment’s interruption could compromise so much.

Despite understanding the importance of improving network performance—a priority that is second only to ensuring data security and compliance, according to IDC’s 2019 Datacenter Operational Survey—downtime continues to be a big problem for data centers. Preventing downtime starts with creating a healthy and robust IT backbone, or central nervous system, that connects all components of your infrastructure.

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Healthcare organizations can succeed in doing this three ways:

1. Upgrade and optimize your legacy data center.

451 Research’s Voice of the Enterprise 2019 Annual Data Center Survey shows that aging infrastructure and keeping up with infrastructure demands are the top critical infrastructure challenges for healthcare organizations. If you are looking for ways to optimize your legacy data center, it may be time to upgrade key components or invest in technologies or services that help you monitor and manage the health of your infrastructure. As you plan for these investments, keep these tips in mind:

  • Consider investing in a recommissioning process to help you identify areas for efficiency improvement and upgrades that will bring your legacy data center up to meet today’s challenges.
  • Integrate intelligent products and solutions where possible, increase visibility, access, and control; along with detecting and quickly correcting problems before they cause downtime.
  • Look for future-proof, intelligent UPS systems that cover the backup power and power quality needs of your IT infrastructure. The best solutions will check five boxes:
    1. Intelligent (network connectivity and monitoring capabilities)
    2. Energy-efficient
    3. Reliable
    4. Modular
    5. Easy-to-maintain
  • Choose thermal solutions that deliver the right cooling capacity while avoiding overcooling. Containment is another strategy that’s gaining traction, as it separates hot and cold airstreams to eliminate reconditioning the same air, thus boosting efficiency by 30% or more.Scenario08final
  • Monitoring and data analysis. Monitoring systems such as Vertiv™ Environet™ allow you to keep tabs on power and cooling systems and environmental conditions

2. Build new flexible, scalable, and efficient data centers.

As delivery networks expand and emerging technologies increase loads, organizations need more space to manage IT. If it’s the right time to invest in a new data center, it’s the prime opportunity to make choices that will help future-proof your healthcare IT strategy, including:

  • Select intelligent power, thermal management, and monitoring solutions as well as racks, power distribution, and enclosures. Set the stage for better visibility, control, and planning capabilities that improve performance throughout the lifecycle of your data center.
  • Take advantage of prefabricated solutions that can save time and money while still allowing for customization and monitoring
  • Standardize equipment from one vendor to reduce costs through increased buying power. It also streamlines buying processes, workflow procedures, training requirements, and often simplifies maintenance
  • Invest in commissioning support. Commissioning can give you peace of mind that your new facility is designed, installed, tested, and maintained in ways that optimize performance throughout your data center’s lifecycle.

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3. Ensure proper protection and management of assets housed in a colocation environment or the cloud.

According to the results of 451 Research’s Voice of the Enterprise survey, about two out of five healthcare organizations currently use cloud service providers, while just over a quarter rent space from a colocation provider. Most (70%) own and operate their own data centers.  However, it’s entirely possible to protect and manage assets even when they are stored off-premise. Here are some strategies that can help:

  • Critical features to look for include intelligent, energy-efficient power and cooling technologies along with DCIM software to monitor the entire facility, fault-tolerant designs for backup power and cooling solutions, proper equipment maintenance practices, on-site technicians, and a solid understanding of HIPAA compliance.
  • Don’t make the mistake of relying on a ‘set it and forget it’ strategy. You can provide your cabinet equipped with features that improve security and efficiency, including biometric locks, smart PDUs that monitor power usage, and RFID technology that sends you alerts whenever an asset is accessed.
  • Hybrid cloud solutions can provide a way to tap into extra capacity for some assets. A recent article by Hit Infrastructure speaks to this growing trend, which allows companies to store different types of data in different locations based on how much bandwidth is required, the sensitivity of the information, and how often it needs to be accessed.

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Make sure your critical systems never miss a beat.

No matter where you choose to house your IT backbone, ensuring its health and viability is a must. With the right infrastructure solutions, you can create a powerful central nervous system that improves the connectivity and reliability of the digital infrastructure that powers your operations.

To learn more about protecting your IT backbone, contact DVL to discover how Vertiv solutions are helping more than 80% of U.S. healthcare systems achieve continuity for life. And be sure to stay tuned for our next post on growth at the healthcare edge.

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Topics: Data Center, efficient data center, healthcare, Resizing

Protect the IT Backbone: A Connected Network Nervous System

by Robert Leake on 9/16/20 1:12 PM

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For the next few weeks, we’ll be publishing a Joint Blog Series with Vertiv that's focused on strategies to strengthen the IT Edge Network. While focusing in the world of Healthcare, the messages will resonate with anyone working within a distributed IT environment:

In many ways, the physical and IT infrastructure that make up Healthcare’s Edge environment is a lot like the human body. It is comprised of a complex network of systems and applications that have to work independently and collaboratively to support the ongoing health of your operations, and enable it to deliver life-saving work in increasingly distributed locations.

When you gain insight into the vital signs of this infrastructure—factors such as connectivity, efficiency, reliability, and scalability—you’ll better understand the solutions and support you need to keep your entire operation functioning at peak performance.


Achieving Continuity for Life

In this new blog post series, we explore these vital signs and offer insight into how your critical infrastructure systems function in much the same way as the amazing human body. As a trusted provider to more than 80% of healthcare systems across the country, Vertiv knows what it takes to maintain healthy, robust physical and IT infrastructure that supports healthcare continuity and the ongoing delivery of high-quality care upon which every person depends. To help healthcare leaders gain greater confidence in the availability and reliability of building systems, healthcare data, and medical equipment, DVL brings you Vertiv solutions that help you:

Protect the IT Backbone: A Connected Network Nervous System
Much like the central nervous system serves as the human body’s command and control center, coordinating all other body systems by receiving and sending information and signals, the IT backbone plays this role in your healthcare system. Future-ready digital infrastructure protects the critical path upon which your patient data travels, the equipment clinicians use each day, and the data center systems that power your business. Whether that IT backbone exists in a data center, a colocation environment, the cloud, or a combination thereof, Vertiv architects reliable, interoperable, and intelligent infrastructure in a scalable, cost-effective way to enable your healthcare system to meet future demands while operating seamlessly and ensuring the highest levels of continuity today.
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Grow the Healthcare Edge: A Strong Skeletal System
A skeleton provides structure, support, and protection for a system. It serves as a framework that defines what a system will ultimately look like and helps dictate the parameters and functionality of the system. As healthcare networks become increasingly distributed, moving to remote locations beyond the main hospital campus and incorporating new technologies such as IoMT sensors, telemedicine centers, and wearables, they require a healthy framework that enables infrastructure solutions to flex and scale to accommodate growth at the edge while maintaining reliability, efficiency, and compliance of healthcare operations.

Manage the New Distributed IT Infrastructure: A Robust Circulatory System
The circulatory system circulates blood and transports oxygen and nutrients to all parts of the body while carrying away waste. As healthcare delivery becomes increasingly complex and distributed, with healthcare data growing exponentially and providers needing access to it in more and more remote locations, the need to securely send and receive data is paramount. Vertiv solutions protect your network connections through advanced visibility and access to distributed IT in locations ranging from network closets across the hospital to remote urgent care and telemedicine centers. At the same time, Vertiv solutions put your business leaders at the heart of the distributed network, providing a central engine for remote management, control, and analytics that fuels better decision making.

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Optimize Healthcare Operations: A Healthy Immune System

The immune system keeps people healthy. It’s what enables the body to protect and heal itself from diseases so that it can function at peak performance. Major healthcare systems must also be protected from a variety of ‘threats’ that can hinder continuity and jeopardize productivity, profitability, and compliance. These include factors such as aging physical infrastructure, rising energy costs, natural disasters, ever-changing regulatory requirements, a shortage of skilled workers, and lack of the right tools to manage increasingly distributed infrastructure. Vertiv helps healthcare systems develop their immunity and stay healthy with solutions that upgrade physical infrastructure and ensure clean, uninterrupted power. Through commissioning, electrical testing, and predictive and preventive maintenance of the power and cooling systems that protect your infrastructure, we help create efficient, safe environments that maximize the productivity of both people and equipment. We can help you actively plan for emergency response. And we can supplement your staff with our own team of experts. Our goal is to keep you compliant, drive down your costs, improve your workforce productivity, and extend the life of your critical building systems all while helping you maintain continuity of operations.
Dive deeper into your healthcare system’s vital signs.

Data Center
At DVL, we understand that even a moment’s interruption of your building systems, IT network, or medical equipment can compromise the delivery of care, undermine the patient experience, and even mean the difference between life or death. In future posts of this series, we’ll look more closely at the vital signs your physical and IT infrastructure must exhibit to safeguard against these interruptions along with the specific solutions Vertiv offers to keep your healthcare system healthy and ensure Continuity for Life.

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Topics: Data Center, efficient data center, IT, healthcare, mission-critical

Understanding the Critical Infrastructure Behind Healthcare Facilities

by Jodi Holland on 4/23/20 3:22 PM

In recent years, the IT world has been seeing a movement to the Edge across most industries, especially in the realms of Finance, Legal, and Healthcare. Now, the Coronavirus pandemic has added a new variable to the Edge equation for Healthcare, as facilities across the country are constructing additions to their hospitals in support of testing and providing care. A recent DVL webinar addressed this rising concern, with many of the products and solutions discussed (and here below) being applicable to Edge environments in any industry.

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Unfortunately, there is no playbook for building these temporary facilities. While they do require the same types of critical infrastructure as facilities we’re used to creating, they demand an even greater sense of confidence in their operability. The aspects of building out temporary facilities are not terribly different than what is typically driving the demands of Healthcare IT: Electronic Records Management, Artificial Intelligence, and communications amongst staff and with patients and staff. The critical infrastructure supporting these applications must take into account an additional set of considerations for these temporary facilities:

  • Footprint Size
  • Power Requirements
  • Environmental Conditions
  • Procurement & Installation
  • Deployment Timeframe
  • Infrastructure Monitoring

If a Playbook were to exist on this topic, it would include chapters like:

  • Defining your specific applications
  • What do those applications require to operate
  • How do those requirements translate into critical infrastructure, and
  • How to build your infrastructure for efficient operations.

This is where DVL can be helpful to your project. Our commitment to going “Beyond the Product” means we don’t just sell you equipment and move to the next customer. Rather, we are here to help you connect the dots and present you with solutions to meet your objectives. Each project is its own unique venture as we work with you to define and understand everything from power and cooling requirements driven by your specific IT applications, to what type of rack is best suited for your peace of mind.

Temporary-Healthcare-Facilities-Buying-Guide-1No matter your industry, if you weren’t able to join us for the one-hour webinar, we invite you and your colleagues to watch the recording here. Or, you can download our Buyer's Guide for a better understanding of the aforementioned critical infrastructure considerations.   

Get the Guide by filling out the form below:

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Topics: server room, healthcare, hospitals, beyond the product

Finding the right architecture for power protection in hospitals

by Emerson Network Power on 3/30/16 8:42 AM

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If you’ve read the post about distributed and centralized bypass architectures, you’re probably evaluating the right architecture for a new datacenter, or maybe you’re re-designing the one you’re currently using. The decision is not easy and it will often impact the operation and performance of the power protection system in your datacenter or the connected loads. Unfortunately, in technology there is rarely a simple “yes – no” or black – white” answer, and this holds true for power distribution as well. Yet, in technology and science, there’s a “grey area”, in which the ‘right’ decision is strongly influenced by the specific context and case, and is dependent on many parameters. Luckily, there are paths to find the best solution as a trade-off between the multiple parameters involved.

If you’re considering the use of an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS), it means you are worried about the possibility of utility power failures and the associated downtime problems that follow. Given this, the selection of the appropriate configuration or architecture for power distribution is one of the first topics of discussion, and the use of a centralized, parallel, distributed, redundant, hot-standby or other configurations available, becomes an important part of it.  While there are numerous architectures to choose from, there are also several internal variables that will require your attention. Fortunately, a few elementary decisions will make the selection easier. Even if not all parameters can be matched, it’s important to at least begin the conversation and explore trade-offs and other considerations. Without trying to be exhaustive (which would require a dedicated white paper), you should consider at least the following:

a) Cost: more complex architectures will increase both your initial investment and your cost, not only at the initial design stage but during the entire life of your power system, especially with regards to efficiency. In other words, we could say that complex architectures will increase your TCO.

b) Availability and reliability: how reliable should your power system be? And what about single or multiple points of failure? Would you need any type of redundancy?

c) Plans for growth: Do you expect your power demand or capacity to increase in the future? Will you re-configure your load distribution?

d) Related to the previous point, but highlighted separately because of its importance for UPS is modularity. Do you need a modular solution for future expansion or redundancy?

e) Bypass architecture; an important point as explained in a separate post.

f) Need for monitoring of the complete UPS power system, also considering any shutdown of loads, and in combination with other systems like thermal management.

g) Service and maintenance: Once the initial investment in power protection has been made, please do not forget to keep it at optimum conditions. This maintenance at regular intervals has to be achieved through service contracts, check for spares availability if multiple types of UPS are used, capability to isolate a subset, or use of remote diagnostic and preventive monitoring services such as Emerson Network Power’s LIFE for maximum availability.

h) Profile of the loads; especially if you’re considering a few large loads or many “small” loads (perhaps distributed across several buildings or in a wide area such as a wind farm), autonomy required for each load, peak power demands, etc.

In addition, the decision is not only related to the internal requirements of the power systems, but it is also linked to the type of load or application to be protected, as requirements and decisions may vary depending on the application being industrial, education, government, banking, healthcare or data center. For example, an application where the loads are servers which manage printers in a bank, compared to a hospital where the power protection systems may manage several surgery rooms, are by no means the same. In fact, in the case of bank printers, in the worst case they can be shut down, while in the case of the surgery rooms, their shutdown is not an option unless for scheduled maintenance. This is because a non-scheduled shutdown of the medical equipment in a surgery room would have a serious impact on the people inside that room for a surgical operation.

Let’s take the hospital example further and consider a particular case. In order to do a quick exercise and simplify, we can use a scenario with several surgery rooms as a reference (for example 5 to 20 rooms, each one with a 5-10 kVA UPS for individual protection), plus a small data center (for example with 30 kVA power consumption) and finally, other critical installations in the facility (let’s assume 300 kVA for offices, laboratories, elevators, etc.).

In this scenario, initially, the architectures that could be envisaged as a first step are:

1. Fully distributed, and for simplicity’s sake, a hospital with 10 surgery rooms is assumed here with 10 kVA for each surgery room plus a centralized UPS (>330 kVA) for the remaining loads.

2. A fully redundant solution based on a centralized UPS protecting all the loads (this UPS being in a parallel redundant configuration). The power for any of these UPS would be 300 kVA + 30 kVA + (10 x 10 kVA).

3. An intermediate solution, referred to as “redundant hot standby”, so that this redundant UPS is sized only for the surgery rooms (10 surgery rooms x 10 kVA), and with a bypass line connected to the large centralized UPS (>430 kVA). This solution shows the advantage of a smaller capacity required for this redundant hot standby UPS.

Emerson Network Power has done several simulations based on typical scenarios as the one described above for a hospital, and considered the factors for optimization a), b), e) and h). Considering the parameters for optimization, the energy savings (power consumption and heat dissipation), initial investment (CAPEX) as well as the maintenance costs (OPEX), the solution based on the “redundant hot standby” seems to be the most convenient.
Moreover, the difference between architectures 1 and 3 is larger as far as quantity of surgery rooms or period for cost simulation (from 1 year up to 10 years).
This points us in the right direction in selecting the best distribution architecture for this application in hospitals and using these parameters for optimization. Clearly, it can be enriched using the other parameters shown in the sections above, or adapted to the particular case (quantity of surgery rooms, autonomy for each load, power demanded by CPD room, reliability, …) that could lead to a different choice, but globally, this redundant hot standby has resulted in a good trade-off.

As said at the beginning, there is no magic solution for the optimum selection, but we have sought to explore several guidelines and check points that will help drive you towards the best solution for your case. Of course, any additional variables and the reader’s experience are welcome and can only serve to enrich the discussion.

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Topics: Data Center, PUE, energy, UPS, Efficiency, Thermal Management, DCIM, Uptime, sustainability, energy efficiency, preventative maintenance, power system, healthcare, hospitals

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