The healthcare industry, in particular the hospitals, is one where business operations are ongoing 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There is no such thing as a complete close of business. HealthTech is no different, as staff are deployed 365 days a year to make sure that IT services are smoothly delivered to support the critical healthcare work. This issue, we take a look at the two data centres that serve the public healthcare family.

What is a Data Centre

Just like a human body which houses a combination of essential organs to function properly, data centres are places with a wide array of critical IT equipment for the purpose of storing, processing and disseminating data. To help you understand a data centre better, we compare it with something that all of us are familiar with – a human body.

Human Body Data Centre

Data Centre Staff

Every hospital has different professionals to keep it running. Likewise, data centres employ different people to keep it running, such as technical architects, network and security engineers, and operators. There are between 20 and 30 tech professionals staffing the two data centres at any one time.

They perform a variety of roles such as ensuring the infrastructure design of new systems is aligned to the existing architecture, monitoring the flow of network traffic to ensure that your messages and transactions are flowing smoothly, implementing security measures, and performing server health checks and data backups.

Healthcare-Cloud (H Cloud)

Many of the e-transactions that healthcare staff use in their day-to-day work, such as Electronic Medical Records, flow through two data centres. The data centres houses the Healthcare Cloud (H Cloud), and they reside in two locations in Singapore – one in the North and one in the East. In total, over 170 staff at the two data centres manage more than 5,000 servers, 1 petabyte (about 1 million gigabyte) of storage and over 350 network, security and network equipment such as routers, switches, and firewalls.

Given its criticality in the smooth functioning of healthcare services, these data centres are manned every minute of the day by operators and engineers. For example, on the National Day public holiday, a total of 23 staff were working to ensure that the data centres were running smoothly, with most of them working 12 hour shifts each.

Cybersecurity is paramount to the data centres to protect our Critical Information Infrastructure and Mission Critical Systems. Physical access is only given to authorised personnel. In addition, 2-factor authentication is required to enter – access card and finger printing.

Surveillance cameras are positioned at strategic locations to monitor the premises at all times. For visitors allowed in for work purposes, staff conduct a body screening to ensure that they do not have thumb drives, and escort them around until they complete their task.

To enhance the cybersecurity of H-Cloud, it has different layered zones, with the most critical servers being placed in the “trusted user” zone. Each layer is protected by a set of firewalls controlling the type of traffic allowed to pass through. They are also protected by many types of security measures, such as Intrusion Prevention System, Anti-Distributed Denial of Service, and Managed Security Services.

Just as healthcare staff do their daily rounds in hospitals, operators do a walkthrough of the data centres every day to inspect the devices for any potential problems. As data centres are not small places, it usually takes close to 30 minute to do so.

Physical inspections aside, monitoring systems are in place to monitor the infrastructure, with the health status dashboard of the various equipment displayed on large screens. Alerts are automatically sent to duty engineers if a potential issue is detected.

Data Centre Staff also have to monitor the execution of about 10,000 scheduled jobs daily, such as system health checks, backing up data and servers, re-running unsuccessful scheduled jobs, overseeing the execution of planned maintenance works, troubleshooting, preparing incident reports, verifying inventory, and ensuring that Admission, Discharge, Transfer (ADT) messages are flowing smoothly across the network.

This last task is especially critical, as a delayed or failed message flow between hospital systems could lead to potentially serious consequences. Hence, a central dashboard which triggers alerts when messages are stuck is always closely monitored.

The Modern Data Centre

In the past, organisations usually had their data centre and servers on premise. This meant that within the hospital itself, a significant amount of space was dedicated to housing such IT equipment. However, the trend has shifted towards off-premise data centres. This means that instead of having a data centre housed in a hospital, it is now housed in a dedicated data centre away from the hospital. In general, this is also known as cloud computing.

There are many advantages to this arrangement. First and foremost, it frees up the hospitals from having to design, build, maintain and protect the data centre, allowing them to focus on the delivery of healthcare.

There is also economies of scale. When data centres were in the hospitals, they took up a total floor area of over 30,000 square feet, or about 30 4-room HDB flats.

With the consolidation of those in-hospital data centres into two external H-Cloud data centres, coupled with the use of high-powered and density-efficient racks, the total floor area needed has been reduced to about 8,000 square feet, or about 10 4-room flats. This has freed up valuable space at the hospitals to be converted into wards or even offices.

Average additional compute provisioning time has also been reduced from 6-8 weeks to 2-3 days, with some requests being fulfilled as fast as within half a day. This is because with a dedicated external data centre, there is no need for hospital IT staff to procure additional servers when needed, wait for them to be delivered and spend time setting it up.

Consolidating of servers into dedicated spaces across public healthcare has also resulted in cost savings.

Further cost savings are derived from cooling and compute delivery efficiency. For example, data centre cooling is kept efficient through the use of hot and cold aisle for optimum flow of air to and from the cooling units.

More applications now run on virtualised servers, which optimizes the use of computers, storage and network resources and thus resulting in better resource efficiency.

There are upcoming plans to further modernise the data centres, making them more green, efficient and secure through the use of motion sensors, efficient LED lighting and automation tools to deliver services. In addition, H-Cloud will be embarking on a hybrid cloud model. Broadly, this means an increase in time to market and on-demand scalability – better, faster services for you.

Recently Completed Works to Upgrade the Data Centre

Due to COVID-19, a significant number of people transited to working from home. Staff at the data centres have been hard at work to implement measures to ensure a smoother transition.

For example, the capacity of our load balancers as well as the dual internet links to both data centres have been upgraded – from 700 megabytes to 1 gigabytes per second. This is akin to widening the lanes of a road so that bigger vehicles can pass through. The higher capacity translates into smoother data flow and a more seamless experience for healthcare staff, and was especially necessary given the implementation of Skype video conferencing for the clusters, which has become a key mode of communications since the start of COVID-19.

Recently Completed Works to Support COVID-19 Operations

Staff also responded quickly to emergency IT requests, such as the Singapore General Hospital (SGH) requesting to set up a new network in a remote site on its campus to support the Fever Screening Area. This involved setting up new connections from H-Cloud and multiple tests to ensure smooth data flow. Implementation was carried out at night to minimise any disruptions.

Other improvement works include increasing the storage capacity of TigerConnect to support healthcare operations, as use of the messaging platform increased significantly during the initial months of the pandemic, and assisting in ensuring cybersecurity at the Community Care Facilities.

In a digital age, healthcare and HealthTech have a symbiotic relationship, working closely together to deliver the best possible care to patients. We hope this article has helped you understand the inner workings of a data centre better.

Learn more about related job roles: H-Cloud Data Centre Job Roles

View related article: All about H-Cloud Singapore's Public Healthcare Cloud System