European Medical Center Drives Cutting-Edge Research with Mirantis OpenStack Private Cloud

Integrating floods of clinical data

As more healthcare data goes digital, medical research institutes face the difficult challenge of integrating huge amounts of clinical data so that scientists can get new insights into diseases and innovate new treatments. This is especially true as more scientists work with IoT medical devices and genomics, making the flood of medical research data faster and greater than ever before.

One of the largest medical centers in Europe wanted to tackle this problem by creating efficient management infrastructure for clinical research data. National privacy and healthcare regulations require medical data to be processed and stored on-premises. The infrastructure team started out by creating individual virtual machines for applications, using KVM virtualization on bare metal, but provisioning resources was inefficient, requiring tickets to the operations team.

A journey with OpenStack

When OpenStack emerged, the team wanted to try deploying an agile private cloud for hosting applications and managing storage. They completed a proof of concept with a top OpenStack vendor and liked the self-service provisioning, flexible resource allocation, and ease of configuration. However, manual in-place upgrades were extremely complex and caused downtime. So they wanted to find a commercial-grade OpenStack distribution with enterprise support.

After several years, the infrastructure team extended the deployment using Mirantis’ latest OpenStack platform, Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes, which improves the configurability, upgradability, and resilience of OpenStack by containerizing its control plane. The team deployed a production OpenStack cloud to host a data integration center and added Ceph software-defined storage. The cloud runs third-party applications, including Elasticsearch, Docker Engine, and platforms for electronic health records. Additionally, it runs interfaces for connecting third-party applications to hospital IT and performing data integration and process automation (ETL).

The infrastructure team also deployed GPU nodes to test workloads that require greater computational power, such as AI-driven real-time analyses of radiological images and remote patient monitoring with wearable IoT devices. Developers may potentially containerize these workloads, and having Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes means they already have the tooling in place to deploy, manage, and monitor Kubernetes clusters.

Infrastructure reliability and world-class support

As a governmental organization, the medical center prioritizes infrastructure reliability as the most important benefit of OpenStack.

“We’ve been very happy with how smoothly the infrastructure has been running, allowing our scientists to conduct important research,” the cloud engineer said.

Other crucial benefits include the flexibility of resource allocation and configuration, self-service provisioning, and ease of network configuration using the GUI.

The infrastructure team also appreciates Mirantis’ outstanding enterprise support, delivered by industry-leading OpenStack experts. “I’m highly satisfied with Mirantis support. It’s nearly 100% perfect,” the cloud engineer said. “The only time we had a problem, it was fixed very quickly.”

Given their positive experiences with Mirantis, the medical center plans to expand with two more data centers for high availability.

“We started a good journey together, and we’ve had a nice relationship with Mirantis over the years with really good support,” the cloud engineer said.

With the new, upgraded platform, the medical center is set for continued success on their open infrastructure journey, empowering researchers to use greater amounts of data to make scientific breakthroughs and deliver medical innovations.