As a renowned hospital in Tianjin with eight decades of history, Tianjin First Central Hospital is a comprehensive tertiary hospital integrating medical treatment, education, scientific research, prevention, and healthcare. It ranks among China’s largest single-site public hospitals. Growing demands for high-quality medical services among Tianjin residents have driven the hospital to continuously expand its scale and capabilities. Its newly opened campus boasts 2,000 patient beds and is designed to handle 7,000 outpatient visits per day.

During the construction of the new campus, Tianjin First Central Hospital collaborated deeply with Xinqidian Group to establish a comprehensive smart-hospital platform for diagnosis, treatment, and management. Xinqidian’s distributed storage provides rapid and reliable medical image storage and access services for the PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System), while its Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) serves core systems including LIS (Laboratory Information System) and EMR (Electronic Medical Record). This stable, secure, and trustworthy digital foundation forms the cornerstone for innovation and application in smart healthcare.

Restructured Tiered Storage for High-Quality Medical Imaging

In the daily operations of Tianjin First Central Hospital, the PACS system digitally stores massive volumes of medical images—including MRI, CT, and ultrasound scans—enabling doctors to access and utilize medical imaging data more quickly and easily. As digital imaging technology becomes increasingly integral to clinical workflows, imaging data now accounts for more than 80% of the hospital’s total data volume. Annual imaging data generated by large tertiary hospitals reaches 50–80 TB. Compounded by Chinese regulations mandating a minimum 15-year retention period, these demands exert immense pressure on PACS systems for data access and storage management.

As a leading comprehensive tertiary hospital in Tianjin, Tianjin First Central Hospital plans for its PACS imaging system to reach a data volume of hundreds of terabytes within three years. The system must meet both online storage requirements for active imaging data and nearline storage needs for cold data. Since the online storage provides real-time image data storage and access, it requires exceptional performance and stability. The nearline storage must ensure data interoperability with online storage while also providing high scalability and stability.

Xinqidian deployed a PACS storage solution for Tianjin First Central Hospital consisting of nine H3C X10000 distributed storage nodes. This configuration establishes tiered data pools for hot and cold imaging data using all-flash and hybrid-storage nodes. Specifically, the PACS system’s databases and critical applications reside on high-performance NVMe SSDs in the X10000 all-flash nodes, providing high I/O performance and low-latency access for image retrieval and core hospital operations. Five all-flash nodes implement block storage architecture to host frequently accessed recent imaging data, while four hybrid-storage nodes manage nearline and offline data storage.

The Xinqidian X10000 distributed storage system delivers comprehensive node configurations for the hospital’s PACS, including high-performance NVMe all-flash nodes along with cost-effective hybrid-storage nodes and dedicated capacity nodes. It supports multiple data protection strategies such as replication and erasure coding (EC). Through intelligent management software, automated data tiering between hot and cold storage pools is achieved with unified management, establishing an imaging data resource pool with superior performance and balanced cost-effectiveness for Tianjin First Central Hospital.

Stability and Reliability: Building High-Efficiency Platforms for Healthcare Information Systems

Beyond HIS (Hospital Information System) and PACS systems, Tianjin First Central Hospital utilizes a virtualized platform to host critical systems including LIS, EMR, operational management systems, and internet-based systems. Although medical data volumes in these systems remain relatively small, they necessitate exceptionally stringent security standards. Therefore, the hospital’s new virtualized platform must ensure data transmission and storage security through reliable disaster recovery capabilities, while deploying robust security mechanisms to mitigate potential risks such as data breaches.

For the virtualization infrastructure deployment, New H3C Technologies provided Tianjin First Central Hospital with dozens of high-performance SimpliVity 380 Gen10 hyper-converged platforms. These systems feature integrated backup and disaster recovery capabilities, supporting over 200 virtual machines running critical applications such as HIS, Clinical Information System (CIS), clinical auxiliary systems (LIS, EMR), and interface gateway systems. The solution ensures data security and stability while delivering efficient storage management through competitive deduplication and compression ratios. This approach optimizes storage utilization, enhances overall performance, and establishes a reliable and stable data platform for core medical services. In terms of management, the SimpliVity hyper-converged infrastructure achieves deep integration with vCenter, enabling unified management of critical healthcare systems and significantly simplifying the administration of the hospital’s digital platform.

Currently, Xinqidian Group ensures rapid deployment and reliable delivery of the storage platform through professional and timely services, achieving seamless integration with the hospital’s existing digital infrastructure. This enables highly efficient and dependable data services that significantly enhance the quality and efficiency of clinical workflows. As smart healthcare accelerates its transformation, Xinqidian will continue advancing its “Cloud & AI Native” strategy. By empowering digital infrastructure with “Native Intelligence”, Xinqidian will drive digital transformation for more industry users, unlock the value within massive data through enhanced governance capabilities, and empower the realization of the “Healthy China 2030” vision.