After a merger with Antes, healthcare organization Parnassia Group opted for new data centers and outsourcing technical management on the private cloud. PQR developed and implemented a new hyper-converged infrastructure in close cooperation with Parnassia Group. The new ICT environment is managed by PQR based on the SpaceHub service.
About Parnassia Group
Parnassia Groep is the largest provider of mental health care (ggz) in the Netherlands. Parnassia Group’s more than 13,500 professionals treat and counsel more than 180,000 patients annually. This is done in small-scale treatment teams located in 70 communities and in and around 600 general practices.
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Eugene Wijnvoord is Team Leader of Technical Management Infrastructure at Parnassia Group. “We currently have 132 locations with a network connection. This ranges from small locations for a few people, to sites with as many as 30 properties. Some of the different labels have their own requirements and pace when it comes to electronic patient records, for example. From the service center, we centrally provide and manage IT services for the entire organization.”
From 4 to 2 data centers
Parnassia Group has grown significantly in recent years through a number of acquisitions. The most notable in 2017 was the merger between Antes and Parnassia Group. In addition to the organizational impact, this had implications for the IT environment. Both organizations each already had 2 data centers in need of renewal. In addition, there was “end of support” on some of the equipment so it had to be replaced. Parnassia Group decided to consolidate the old environments into 2 new data centers for the entire group, and launched a market survey.
Focus on care
“Beforehand, we had set some clear objectives. In addition to high availability, performance and scalability, our new IT environment had to support our cloud roadmap. Another important starting point was that we no longer wanted to do the technical management ourselves. Our focus is on healthcare, and the applications that support it. Therefore, we wanted to place the technical management on the private cloud with a specialized party that has the necessary expertise for this in-house and offers 24×7 support.” Thus Eugene Wijnvoord.
The choice of PQR
After an extensive selection process, Parnassia Group chose PQR. In response to customer needs, PQR offered a private cloud based on a Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure, based on high availability and availability. Management of the new environment is based on SpaceHub services. After delivery, Parnassia Group handled the actual migration, after which the environment went into production in February 2020.
“The cooperation with PQR is going very well, There is a lot of technical knowledge within PQR. In addition, the people at PQR know our organization and understand the technology chain within Parnassia Group, and the impact of choices made anywhere.”
– Eugene Wijnvoord, Parnassia Group
Root cause analysis
“But with any IT project, something can go wrong, and it happened to us – just as we were about to go live with our Nutanix environment. A very complex problem occurred for which a root cause analysis was initiated to find out the exact cause. In solving this problem, a very nice collaboration emerged. Ultimately, PQR’s approach led to a structural improvement path on that environment. Given the time pressure for delivery, that was really intense at the time, but in the end it did result in a stable environment that runs perfectly as we had requested.”
“As far as I’m concerned, this has purely to do with how you deal with each other: we stayed in constant dialogue with each other and solved it together. I have experienced this differently with other suppliers. PQR shows that they want to be a partner, not a supplier. It is not for nothing that PQR is at the top of our list in terms of suppliers.”
– Eugene Wijnvoord, Parnassia Group
The benefits of both hybrid and public cloud
Eugene Wijnvoord: “The private cloud environment developed by PQR is enormously future-proof because of the flexibility it offers. We are also in the process of automating a number of ICT processes, which will allow us to enjoy the benefits of both hybrid and public cloud without any problems in the future. But our collaboration with PQR offers more benefits. We have jointly changed the change process, making it much more flexible and preventing my team from being surprised by changes.”
Next steps
Now that the new data centers are running smoothly, Parnassia Group and PQR are working on the next steps. Eugene Wijnvoord: “We can now start making improvements to our workstations. But changes in the workplace often have an impact on the underlying infrastructure, so we need to prepare properly. A good example is the ability to migrate our Exchange environment to a Microsoft 365 environment. If you want to offer that decently performing to the user then you have to cache that, which in turn affects capacity and thus cost. We are now going to set up a PoC with PQR to really test that.”
Security Roadmap
“Another issue we are looking at with PQR is our security roadmap on the existing environment. An important issue, because as a mental health institution, we record a great deal of our clients’ personal and privacy-sensitive information. It is incredibly important to make the right choices in all these areas so that we are well prepared for the future. And that’s where PQR helps us.”
