Western Sydney Local Health District

Client

WSLHD delivers health services to more than one million people living in the state’s fastest growing region. This area includes five major hospitals – Westmead, Blacktown, Cumberland, Mount Druitt and Auburn and more than 800 specialist clinics and services. The health care provider, employing more than 14,000 people, is also a major teaching hospital of the University of Sydney for medical and dental students. Westmead is one of Australia’s largest centres for postgraduate training to specialist level in all fields.

Opportunity

WSLHD’s strategic priorities for 2017-2020 are focused at developing a fit-for-purpose health service delivery to transform the way their employees work, and how patients interact with them. To achieve those priorities, they embarked on an innovation journey to improve the access, storage and management of critical data. The health care provider needed a trusted partner to help them harness their data by laying robust and secure infrastructure and network foundations in their two Data Centre locations. WSLHD chose Outcomex as their systems integrator for our engineering depth and experience.

Solution

Outcomex implemented two separate but like-for-like Data Centres in Blacktown and Westmead, providing the ability to migrate important corporate applications onto the platform and away from ageing and unsupported infrastructure. The design was based on a validated multi-vendor architecture with consistent security policy across both platforms and resiliency for key disaster recovery events.

Outcomex followed best practice recommendations to integrate the new solution into existing network environment; supporting Tier 2 and 3 of applications and providing a secure and scalable solution with high resiliency between two data centres. By leveraging Cisco Data Centre technologies, Outcomex implemented secure application segmentation, and consolidated compute and storage from various sources under a single management pane.

Technologies utilised:

Components of the FlexPod infrastructure at Blacktown and Westmead:

•  Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS)
•  NetApp Storage
•  Microsoft Hyper V Hypervisor
•  Networking – Cisco Application Centre Infrastructure (ACI)

Impact

The benefits of the new platform have been realised across the business and have provided a secure, scalable, and robust system that can adapt to the unknown and rapidly changing needs of WSLHD. The key benefit created by the Data Centre validated design comes from a well-supported and documented process which enables WSLHD to host more workloads overtime and scale the architecture without making any dramatic changes to the implementation.

Through this project, Outcomex contributed to make WSLHD’s ICT environment consistent and reliable, which allows employees to have access to accurate information for improved decision making, leading to safer and higher quality health outcomes.