Every day, the vast information systems of a modern comprehensive hospital generate massive volumes of data. For those systems, data is fundamental: operations, analysis, and settlement all draw from the database. Any data loss would cause incalculable harm. For hospitals, which bear on public wellbeing, the importance of disaster recovery and backup is even clearer.

Sugon Storage recently won a contract at a major Grade-A tertiary hospital—West China Hospital Meishan Branch (formerly Meishan People’s Hospital)—to build an active-active disaster-recovery application system across two campuses, creating an active-active data center that safeguards high availability.

A disaster-recovery application system means two or more functionally equivalent IT systems at different sites, monitoring one another’s health and switching functions as needed. When one system stops unexpectedly, the application can fail over to the other so that services continue to run.

Meishan People’s Hospital’s information systems must run 24 hours a day with stringent real-time requirements. When a disaster occurs, business must recover seamlessly and stay continuous. This disaster-recovery build therefore uses Sugon’s self-developed high-performance storage product DS800 to create an active-active data-center design between the two campuses, providing uninterrupted, highly reliable data protection for upper-layer virtualization, databases, and other critical workloads. It helps the hospital’s core systems run efficiently and enables zero-second failover with no manual intervention.

The active-active data center Sugon built with DS800 has two defining strengths. First, resources are fully used: one disaster-recovery center is not left idle year-round; through resource pooling, service capacity of the active-active pair is doubled. Second, it enables site-level recovery. If either site fails, workloads switch rapidly to the data center that is still running, with no application-visible interruption, so core hospital systems keep running.

As a critical business-support system, an active-active data center’s hardware platform must reach 99.999% overall availability. High availability was therefore designed in from the start. Sugon DS800 storage is highly reliable and sufficiently fault-tolerant; the high-end array uses a fully modular redundant architecture with no single point of failure, and it does not interfere with other systems’ software or hardware. To keep the active-active design simple while protecting reliability and performance, the solution does not rely on an extra storage-virtualization gateway.

ROI (return on investment) is also a customer focus: the ratio of capital put into disaster recovery to the value obtained from it. Sugon provides full-lifecycle technical services from design and build through operations. Deployment is flexible, migration is straightforward, and customers’ management and operations costs fall substantially.

Beyond healthcare, as enterprises expand across regions, dual business centers will become a necessary way to resolve the tension between huge data volumes and business responsiveness, and demand will continue to grow.