South African managed ICT service provider, Integr8, has successfully completed a comprehensive revamp of core communications infrastructure for its client, Medhold Medical, an established service provider in the healthcare industry.
Medhold Medical, part of the Medhold Group, required an experienced, credible ICT services provider to assist in addressing issues including standardisation, stability, redundancy and operational flexibility.
“After some discussion, a well-defined virtual infrastructure was presented with Medhold Medical and could be used to host an operationally sound virtual platform with the requisite qualified operational support,” explains Robert Sussman, joint CEO, Integr8.
By following the virtualisation route, the environment can quite easily be scaled out or up when cluster limits have been reached, using similar clusters in a building block approach.
A number of business requirements were identified during the envisioning phase with Integr8 and were taken into consideration during the design process in order to ensure the solution would support them.
These requirements covered:
- Improved hardware support and warranty compliance
- Improved infrastructure performance
- Infrastructure availability
- Optimised storage utilisation
- Optimised Compute Resource Utilisation
- The need to establish formal architecture and documentation.
“We aimed to achieve stability of the Medhold Medical infrastructure by replacing the out-of-warranty hardware and an array of hardware was purchased and implemented, which we host in cabinet space provided by MTN,” Sussman adds.
Executive leadership at Medhold Medical confirmed that the strategy adopted and decisions made have made a measurable difference to the business and that critical issues have been addressed. They acknowledged that while the infrastructure upgrade and implementation is recent, there is every confidence that the infrastructure upgrade and integration will help ensure optimised operations going forward.
