“Care New England Health System (CNE) is comprised of an association of five leading health care providers, each of which has established a reputation as a leader in the domains of community health, research and education. The member organizations of CNE include Butler Hospital, Kent Hospital, Women & Infants Hospital, Care New England Home Health, and the Care New England Wellness Centers. Our associated organizations offer a comprehensive array of services focused on meeting the health care needs of our patients and communities.

“CNE has long recognized that sound implementation of information technology is a critical component to improving the overall care we provide our patients. Three years ago, we embarked on a strategic business plan to enhance the quality of care, while streamlining processes and cutting costs. On the information technology side, we made the decision to digitize as many critical processes as possible.

Rising Expectations Dictate a High Availability Environment
“We knew that once we digitized a particular clinical process, end users would expect much higher availability from their systems. To satisfy this new requirement for enhanced uptime, we executed a thorough assessment and upgrade of our IT infrastructure.

 “We also realized that even the most robust of IT infrastructure designs would be limited in its ability to maintain high availability unless we matched it with a robust physical infrastructure. Therefore, the space planning, cabling, power back-up, power distribution, ventilation and cooling systems, and rack enclosures were also critical components for us to implement if we were to achieve our goal of high availability.

Traditional Solutions No Longer Meet the New Requirements
“In our assessment of available power, cooling and rack enclosure technologies, we determined that many of the physical infrastructure solutions existing in the marketplace today possessed single points of failure, did not employ N+1, fault-tolerant components and could not sufficiently detect and communicate faults at the system and component level over the network.

“If we chose to deploy a traditional system, we also realized that we would be forced to over-size our solution on day one in order to meet the requirements of projected future growth. This would mean higher up front capital costs and higher operational expense. In addition, the complexity and lack of standardization inherent to the traditional design results in a need to enter into expensive third party contractual service agreements.

“Equipment inevitably fails. In our new environment, we needed to be operational in seconds or minutes, not hours or days. When our previous legacy data center power systems failed and brought down all of our critical systems, it took a full day to correct the problem due to lack of standardized, hot-swappable components.

“We also faced some power density issues in our data center. We had been averaging 1.5 kW of power per rack. As we begin to deploy blade servers and storage we are approaching an average requirement of 3-5 kW per rack. Today’s traditional rack and power distribution schemes can only accommodate, on average, 1-2 kW per rack. We needed a new, innovative solution.

Low Cost of Ownership Solution
“Our search for a solution leads us to APC. We had seen advertisements for APC’s new InfraStruXure architecture and were intrigued with the possibilities.  After a thorough review of our defined  requirements, we determined that APC’s ‘On-Demand’ InfraStruXure solution was by far the best fit.

“Rather than buy one oversized 200 kW UPS, we purchased an InfraStruXure solution consisting of four 40kW, N+1 systems with 50 enclosures, air distribution, cable management, environmental monitoring, and metered PDU’s.  The design of the InfraStruXure gives us the flexibility to scale by simply adding additional racks, batteries and power modules.  It’s a true ‘pay as you grow’ system with no high up front costs.  InfraStruXure accommodates our new high-density blade servers and significantly reduces our total cost of ownership.

Last Minute Configuration Changes Are No Problem
“Before completion of our data center layout designs, and right before commencement of the project, we unavoidably and unexpectedly received a last-minute request for additional servers that needed to be included in the design. We were able to quickly reconfigure the InfraStruXure solution design through APC’s Web-based Build Out Tool without altering or delaying our implementation time lines. Such a last minute change under a traditional arrangement would have slowed down the timeline of our build by months and significantly increased our cost.

“The InfraStruXure system components were shipped, installed, and commissioned in very short order. We needed additional power for new equipment installs and simply ordered pre-cut, pre-tested, custom cable ‘whips’ from APC and ran them overhead via the APC Netshelter® VX troughs. This is much faster and more efficient than using a fixed PDU in the wall and running a mess of cabling under the floor.

A Solution for High Density Servers
“APC’s deeper racks accommodate our deeper blade servers exceptionally well. The zero ‘U’ power distribution enables us to plug-in up to 42 blades in one rack. The custom power whips can deliver more kW of power per rack than other conventional solutions. In addition, the overhead power distribution design enables us to more effectively distribute cooling because the space below our raised floor is no longer stuffed with cables that hinder proper air distribution.

“The unique design of the InfraStruXure racks allows us to clean up what was once a rats-nest of patch panels. This clean cabling approach helps us to minimize human error. The APC rack depth, air and power distribution allowed us to pack more than 5kW of blade servers per rack.

High Reliability and Easy Management
“Since we installed InfraStruXure, we have survived three power outages without missing a beat. The InfraStruXure has also notified operators of a minor component fault that needed to be hot-swapped thus avoiding any downtime. It also enabled a major change to the design of the data center in minimal time and saved space through its high-density capabilities.

“Due to the rapid pace of healthcare IT implementation, we needed to be able to deploy systems into the data center more rapidly. APC’s ability to quickly deliver power when and where we need it is unparalleled in the industry.”