The Customer
Wiener Krankenanstaltenverbund (KAV), the Vienna Hospital Association, operates eleven hospitals, including the General Hospital-Medical University Campus; eleven care homes for the elderly; four residential nursing homes with social-medical care and eleven training facilities for general healthcare and nursing care in the City of Vienna.
The KAV is Austria’s largest provider of healthcare education with over 2,100 medical training positions annually for nursing and medical-technical services. The Association employs nearly 32,000 people, who provide a range of medical services for over 400,000 inpatients and 3.5 million outpatients annually.
The Challenge
System integrator and IT specialist, BellEquip, was selected by the KAV to provide a central IT management suite in an off-site location that could remotely manage all the independent IT operations for all the hospitals and sites within the organization.
The key requirement was for IT staff to be able to provide general administration of remote equipment without needing to attend the individual sites and to instantly recognize and deal with emergency and failure situations.
The master control room provides IT staff with instant access to all remote servers and communication systems at each hospital, allowing them to securely manage and control both physical, and computer, access to the equipment in the server rooms within an integrated environment.
The Solution
A large LCD video wall in the center provides information to the whole IT group, whilst individual workstations and docking stations allow team members to access individual computers across the network, enabling them to carry out their day-to-day support and administration tasks.
A 32-port Draco tera KVM matrix switch enables the IT staff within the control room to choose which of the available computer or CCTV video sources they wish to show on the 3 x 2 videowall and on the displays within the personal workstations. Selection is simplified by means of an AMX touch screen control panel with a dedicated icon-based user interface. Pre-defined and stored display configurations allow rapid response situations to be addressed. In emergency situations operators can immediately switch to the pre-defined display configuration and instantly display the pertinent information on all screens. This also extends to the indicator LED illumination around the videowall itself which switches the status color depending upon the situation.
This configuration enables IT staff to monitor the loading on individual hospital server banks using the BizTalk Server Management and Control software and to access individual servers and items of equipment through VPN.
The Benefit
With such a geographically widespread portfolio of properties and wide variation in the types of equipment located at each site, the cost and complexity of employing teams for each individual bank of equipment would be prohibitive. Centralized IT management is therefore the only viable method.
The flexibility achieved through the use of the Draco tera KVM matrix switch enable a small dedicated team of experts to manage the whole of the computer services more efficiently and with a greater level of control. Relevant data can easily be selected for the large videowall and separate personal workstations; instantly and whenever required, allowing the team to work independently or together depending upon the operational status of the network at the time. And allow them to rapidly attend to emergency situations whenever they occur.
“The Draco tera switch provided a lot of flexibility to install and configure the system to meet the customer’s requirement,” said Martin Hinterlehner, CEO of BellEquip. “It allows any computer source or CCTV feed to be instantly presented on the central large videowall or on any other display in the control room so that information is immediately available to whoever needs to access it, leading to a high level of efficiency and management of the servers throughout the hospital network.”
"Programming the AMX control system to control the Draco tera switch was extremely straightforward and enables the It staff to rapidly switch between displays through the touch screen controller in the control room."
– Martin Hinterlehner, CEO of BellEquip
