DelftDI recommends Loadbalancer.org for load balancing critical medical imaging systems

DelftDI, a Canon group company, develops, delivers and maintains radiology and patient imaging systems for hospitals across the globe. For more than ten years, it has been recommending and installing products from Loadbalancer.org to ensure the high availability and performance of these crucial medical applications.

“Doctors use our medical imaging systems to make accurate diagnoses and help save lives. We recommend Loadbalancer.org solutions because they have the stability and performance to keep these vital applications available 24 hours a day, day after day.” -Rens Koster, Team Leader, Healthcare IT, Delft DI

Challenges

• Ensure the high availability of essential medical imaging systems

Solution

• Loadbalancer.org Enterprise MAX hardware and virtualized solutions

Benefits

• Meets hospitals’ expectations for 99.99% service availability
• Eliminates the need for scheduled down-time for system maintenance
• Provides high performance for 100-500 users and 24-hour usage
• Has the scalability to handle increases in application traffic
• Enables the rapid roll-out of applications for new customers

The challenges faced by DelftDI

In busy hospital environments, the reliability of radiology information systems (RIS), Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA) and Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) is of paramount importance. If these pivotal medical imaging applications fail, doctors cannot provide a high quality of patient care; seriously ill people may have to be transferred to other hospitals for assessments; and, ultimately, lives may be put at risk.

DelftDI specializes in supplying, installing and maintaining RIS, VNA and PACS systems for hospitals in the Netherlands and other countries. It has to be able to offer guarantees for the reliability of its systems, so it recommends complementary technologies to its customers that will help to ensure exceptional availability and performance.

The solution provided by Loadbalancer.org

Over more than a decade, DelftDI has urged its customers to install solutions from Loadbalancer.org to balance and optimize the traffic for its RIS, VNA and PACS systems. As Loadbalancer.org products are less expensive than most similar load balancers, they represent good value for money for healthcare organizations with limited funds and many demands on their budgets.

To date, DelftDI has installed Loadbalancer.org products, in conjunction with its medical imaging applications, in more than ten different hospitals. Many of these organizations use hardware appliances from Loadbalancer.org, while others have selected Loadbalancer.org’s virtual solutions. “Our customers have the flexibility to choose the platform that will fit best within their existing IT architectures,” explains Rens Koster, Team Leader for Healthcare IT at DelftDI.

The results

The stability of the Loadbalancer.org products enables DelftDI to ensure the high availability of its medical imaging solutions. “We offer 99.99% up-time guarantees to our customers as part of our contracts,” says Koster. “The Loadbalancer.org products are so stable that they really help us to achieve this high level of reliability.”

By installing two Loadbalancer.org products in a clustered pair, DelftDI is able to undertake upgrades and routine maintenance of its medical imaging applications, without the need for scheduled downtime. According to Koster, this capability sets DelftDI apart from other providers of medical imaging solutions, who often need to arrange maintenance windows, “improving the competitiveness of the business.”

From its ten years of working with Loadbalancer.org, DelftDI knows that Loadbalancer.org products offer consistently good performance for large numbers of users, 24/7. Its customers currently have between 100 and 500 users and, if additional capacity is needed, DelftDI just adds more servers in the background. The Loadbalancer.org products effortlessly balance traffic over the larger estate of servers, increasing the capacity of the medical imaging systems without impacting performance.

Finally, the Loadbalancer.org products are intuitive to configure and set up, which helps DelftDI to deliver solutions for new customers very quickly. Doctors and clinicians can, therefore, start to enjoy all the advantages of the DelftDI RIS, VNA and PACS solutions sooner and deliver a high-quality service for patients.

Here's more information about load balancing medical imaging systems such as PACS, VNA, DICOM, XDS & HL7

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